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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Fortune, Fate, And Free Will: Chaucer’S Encounters With Providence, Ciara Jane Turula
Fortune, Fate, And Free Will: Chaucer’S Encounters With Providence, Ciara Jane Turula
Masters Theses
It’s easy to assume that the world is innately unstable as Chaucer seems to do in the short poems “Truth”, “Lak of Stedfastnesse”, “The Forger Age” and “Gentilesse”, and yet we are called to wonder with the Black Knight in The Book of the Duchess how any divine authority could let this be the case. As Lady Philosophy informs readers in Boece, the world is not really Fortune’s chaotic kingdom of unreliability. Instead, the Earth and all that happens within it has already been laid out in the plan of Providence, which unravels regardless of whether individuals are aware …
Boethian Variations: Musical Thought In Sir Orfeo, Troilus And Criseyde, And Robert Henryson’S Orpheus And Eurydice, Joshua T. Parks
Boethian Variations: Musical Thought In Sir Orfeo, Troilus And Criseyde, And Robert Henryson’S Orpheus And Eurydice, Joshua T. Parks
Masters Theses
This study approaches three poems from the late medieval British Isles—the Middle English Breton lay Sir Orfeo, Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, and Robert Henryson’s Orpheus and Eurydice—through the lens of medieval music theory. The most important authority for medieval music theorists was the late antique philosopher Boethius, who held to a Neoplatonic philosophy of music that valued reason, theory, and contemplation of the music of the spheres. Later medieval theorists cited Boethius extensively while also adapting his thought to suit their own purposes. In particular, the early fourteenth-century French theorist Johannes de Grocheio, influenced by Aristotle, departed …
Tied In Lusty Leese: Animalization And Agency In Troilus And Criseyde, Kendra Marie Slayton
Tied In Lusty Leese: Animalization And Agency In Troilus And Criseyde, Kendra Marie Slayton
Masters Theses
Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde is a tale fraught with ambiguity, and particularly so concerning issues of gender, agency, and free will. Critical readings often focus on depicting TC as Chaucer’s didactic portrayal of a flawed and transitory humanity, with Troilus’s death and transcendence taken as the primary lens through which to seek final meaning in the poem. However, I argue that Chaucer’s use of natural tropes, vocabulary, and artistry also reveal that the poem, before it reaches its transcendental ending, indicts not only the mortal world at large but more specifically the at-times misogynist conventions of the genre itself. Specifically, …