Chaucer S Philosophical Visions

New readings of Chaucer's dream visions, demonstrating his philosophical interests and learning.

Chaucer used the dream device to engage with the work of French and Italian authors and to explore the philosophical content of their poetry. His four dream visions therefore represent an important conduit through which the influence of European writers was received into English, enabling a profound transition in the way in which the 'self' was conceptualized in medieval courtly literature. Chaucer's Dream Visions is the first book length study to examine the poet's considered use of Aristotelian psychology to describe the mind of the courtly subject in its social context. The study shows that by drawing upon Aristotelian psychology, derived from his reading of Boethius, Dante, and the poets of the French court, Chaucer was able to articulate precisely those aspects of the courtly identity that are determined by language and empirical experience, and those which are transcendent of this determinism. A detailed engagement with the literature, language, and behaviour of the court therefore takes place in the dream visions, which are a genuine exploration of individual subjectivity in its social context. The author of this volume demonstrates that the motivation for this exploration is a product of Chaucer's Christian beliefs and philosophical awareness. Chaucer's Dream Visions thus constitutes a major contribution to the debate concerning distinctions between medieval and early modern culture.

As the 'father' of the English literary canon, one of a very few writers to appear in every 'great books' syllabus, Chaucer is seen as an author whose works are fundamentally timeless: an author who, like Shakespeare, exemplifies the almost magical power of poetry to appeal to each generation of readers. Every age remakes its own Chaucer, developing new understandings of how his poetry intersects with contemporary ways of seeing the world, and the place of the subject who lives in it. This Handbook comprises a series of essays by established scholars and emerging voices that address Chaucer's poetry in the context of several disciplines, including late medieval philosophy and science, Mediterranean Studies, comparative literature, vernacular theology, and popular devotion. The volume paints the field in broad strokes and sections include Biography and Circumstances of Daily Life; Chaucer in the European Frame; Philosophy and Science in the Universities; Christian Doctrine and Religious Heterodoxy; and the Chaucerian Afterlife. Taken as a whole, The Oxford Handbook of Chaucer offers a snapshot of the current state of the field, and a bold suggestion of the trajectories along which Chaucer studies are likely to develop in the future.

Provides a rich and varied reference resource, illuminating the different contexts for Chaucer and his work.

Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales was the subject of the first volume in the Approaches to Teaching series, published in 1980. But in the past thirty years, Chaucer scholarship has evolved dramatically, teaching styles have changed, and new technologies have created extraordinary opportunities for studying Chaucer. This second edition of Approaches to Teaching Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales reflects the wide variety of contexts in which students encounter the poem and the diversity of perspectives and methods instructors bring to it. Perennial topics such as class, medieval marriage, genre, and tale order rub shoulders with considerations of violence, postcoloniality, masculinities, race, and food in the tales. The first section, “Materials,†reviews available editions, scholarship, and audiovisual and electronic resources for studying The Canterbury Tales. In the second section, “Approaches,†thirty-six essays discuss strategies for teaching Chaucer’s language, for introducing theory in the classroom, for focusing on individual tales, and for using digital resources in the classroom. The multiplicity of approaches reflects the richness of Chaucer’s work and the continuing excitement of each new generation’s encounter with it.

A study of time in Chaucer's major works. Geoffrey Chaucer wrote at a turning point in the history of timekeeping, but many of his poems demonstrate a greater interest in the moral dimension of time than in the mechanics of the medieval clock. Chaucer and the Ethics of Time examines Chaucer's sensitivity to the insecurity of human experience amid the temporal circumstances of change and time-passage, as well as strategies for ethicising historical vision in several of his major works. While wasting time was occasionally viewed as a sin in the late Middle Ages, Chaucer resists conventional moral dichotomies and explores a complex and challenging relationship between the interior sense of time and the external pressures of linearism and cyclicality. Chaucer's diverse philosophical ideas about time unfold through the reciprocity between form and discourse, thus encouraging a new look at not only the characters' ruminations on time in the tradition of St Augustine and Boethius, but also manifold narrative sequences and structures, including anachronism.

The Cambridge Companion to Chaucer is an extensively revised version of the first edition, which has become a classic in the field. This new volume responds to the success of the first edition and to recent debates in Chaucer Studies. Important material has been updated, and new contributions have been commissioned to take into account recent trends in literary theory as well as in studies of Chaucer's works. New chapters cover the literary inheritance traceable in his works to French and Italian sources, his style, as well as new approaches to his work. Other topics covered include the social and literary scene in England in Chaucer's time, and comedy, pathos and romance in the Canterbury Tales. The volume now offers a useful chronology, and the bibliography has been entirely updated to provide an indispensable guide for today's student of Chaucer.

Reading semiotically against the backdrop of medieval mirrors of princes, Arthurian narratives, and chronicles, this study examines how René d Anjou (1409-1480), Geoffrey Chaucer s House of Fame (ca. 1375-1380), and Edward the Black Prince (1330-1376) explore fame s visual power. While very different in approach, all three individuals reject the classical suggestion that fame is bestowed and understand that particularly in positions of leadership, it is necessary to communicate effectively with audiences in order to secure fame. This sweeping study sheds light on fame s intoxicating but deceptively simple promise of elite glory.