Arts and Humanities Commons^™

"Good To Think With": Women And Exempla In Four Medieval And Renaissance English Texts, Jennifer Fish Pastoor

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines four English texts—Beowulf; Ancrene Wisse; Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales’ Man of Law’s Tale and Second Nun’s Tale; and Richard Hyrde’s English translation, The Instruction of a Christen Woman, of Juan Luis Vives’ De Institutione Feminae Christianae—in terms of their use of exempla related to women. These texts all find women good “to think with,” to use, from The Body and Society, Peter Brown’s appropriation of Levi-Strauss’s famous wordplay. The ways in which these Old English, Middle English, and modern English texts portray women’s lives and bodies as a gateway into thought about the Christian life are also …

To Knytte Up Al This Feeste: The Parson's Rhetoric And The Ending Of The Canterbury Tales, Laurie A. Finke

Laurie Finke

No abstract provided.

From The Perspective Of Eternity, Robin Mcallister

English Faculty Publications

This is a partial history of the literary topos “sub specie aeternitatis”. The Latin phrase means “from the perspective of eternity”. Eternity is the way God sees the universe, not as a succession of moments in time from past, to present, to future, but as a simultaneous present which includes the past and future as if they are already and always present. This temporal simultaneity is accompanied by a spatial totality and simultaneity. In both Chaucer and Dante the protagonist ends life’s wanderings and struggles by being carried up into the heavens and looking back on earth from the point …

Rhetoric And Performing Anger : Proserpina's Gift And Chaucer's Merchant's Tale., Joseph Turner

Faculty Scholarship

Although scholars have historically minimized the relationship between medieval grammatical and rhetorical traditions and Chaucer's poetics, Proserpina's angry speech in the Merchant's Tale represents the intersection of medieval classroom grammar exercises, Geoffrey of Vinsauf's theory of delivery, and poetics. Proserpina's angry speech reveals that her rhetoric is calculated to subvert the masculine power structures that surround her. Such a focus on Chaucer's depiction of women's persuasive tactics helps to highlight Chaucer's deep engagement with rhetoric beginning in the 1380's. Moreover, this investigation asks for increased attention to the overlap between classroom grammatical traditions, rhetorical theory, and medieval poetics.

Philosophical Romance: Figures Of Venus In “The Knight's Tale”, Caleb Molstad

The Hilltop Review

This essay examines Chaucer's use of the Roman goddess Venus in “The Knight's Tale.” It looks at the astrological, mythological, and allegorical meanings that he gives to the figure of Venus in the poem. The essay also considers imaginative techniques, including ekphrasis and allegory, that Chaucer uses to express philosophical ideas within a chivalric romance. Ultimately, it argues that Chaucer uses Venus in “The Knight's Tale” to imaginatively unfold the Boethian idea that love governs the world.

Talking Some Sense Into Chaucer: Bodies In “The Miller’S Prologue” And “The Miller’S Tale”, Jacqueline Joewono

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

If there is one question that underpins the evaluation of any great literary work, it is the following: How does the text make us feel? Through affect and textural studies, the answer becomes more complicated than any old adage might readily convey, for “feeling” here becomes a matter of simultaneous tactility and sentiment. Under this lens, perhaps no historical period becomes more desirable to feel than the Middle Ages; it is here, after all, that readers’ responsibilities with texts are pluralized: readers move from listeners born from oral traditions to participants of all kinds. Feeling, then, may be found in …

Chaucer's Collision Montage, Brandon Simmons

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Sergei Eisenstein’s theory of collision montage can be applied to The Canterbury Tales because Chaucer’s writing is highly visual and often unconventional. This study analyzes several portraits and tales to demonstrate Chaucer’s literary collision montage technique. The opening lines of the General Prologue present the juxtaposition of the tripartite plant and humans to suggest commoners’ social immobility. The interruption of the Miller’s Tale clashes with the Knight’s to suggest the possibility of social mobility and to challenge traditional patriarchy. The latter half of the narrator’s description in the Wife of Bath’s portrait indicates a sexualized subtext through the juxtaposition of …

Telling New Tales: Modernizations Of Chaucer In The Eighteenth Century, Eric Duane Larson

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Any review of medieval culture and literature in the British eighteenth century requires some consideration for the modernizations of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Effectively a collaboration that spanned the entire century, this project began with Dryden and Pope and continued in earnest with lesser-known poets like George Ogle and William Lipscomb. The resulting modernization of every Chaucerian tale between 1700 and 1795 revisits medieval themes, but it also displays contemporary anxieties through presentations of language, content, style, and rhetorical intent that are sometimes vastly different from Chaucer’s originals.

The modernization project is worthy of study, in particular because it reflects, across …

Rhetorical Ductus In Chaucerian Ekphrasis, Emily Laura Pez

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

My thesis investigates how the rhetorical device of ekphrasis functions in Geoffrey Chaucer’s poetry, specifically The Book of the Duchess, The Parliament of Fowls, The House of Fame, and The Knight’s Tale. I argue that Chaucer’s ekphrases incorporate medieval memory techniques, which connect the ekphrases integrally to their respective texts. Chaucer’s early uses of ekphrasis in The Book of the Duchess and The Parliament of Fowls guide the audience’s interpretation and therefore contribute to the ductus, defined by Mary Carruthers as the text’s “overall direction” (“Concept of Ductus . . .” 196). In the …

Freakish, Feathery, And Foreign: Language Of Otherness In The Squire’S Tale, Laurel Meister

The Expositor: A Journal of Undergraduate Research in the Humanities

No abstract provided.

Reading Chaucer With Charity: A Hermeneutical Proposal, Lee H. Downen

The Larrie and Bobbi Weil Undergraduate Research Award

In order to understand the ending of Chaucer's poem "Troilus and Criseyde," one must read him with charity. The person who is indifferent to or suspicious of him will not, to use literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin's words, “be able to generate sufficient attention to slow down and linger intently over [the poem], to hold and sculpt every detail and particular in it, however minute.” The charitable reader, that is, the reader who practices caritas—"love for our neighbor," to use Thomas Aquinas's definition—will be able to appreciate how the Boethian logic and the Thomistic distinctions of the poem allow for the …