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Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Chaucer Chaucer, Geoffrey, English language English language'
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McNamara, Rebecca Fields. "Code-switching in medieval England : register variety in the literature of Geoffrey Chaucer, Thomas Usk and Thomas Hoccleve." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2010. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.669980.
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Ward, Rachel. "Completeness and incompleteness in Geoffrey Chaucer's The canterbury tales." Scholarly Commons, 1994. https://scholarlycommons.pacific.edu/uop_etds/509.
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The author commences with an analysis of the nature of completeness in a variety of situations and media, including visual arts, music, video arts and literature. "Completeness" is determined to be both difficult to define and subject to any individual's personal interpretation. A distinction is made between the 'finished-ness' of works and their completeness as a factor in aesthetic enjoyment. It is noted that some works, though unfinished, are nevertheless complete aesthetically.
Various aspects of completeness are defined, discussed, and considered, including absolute, thematic, plot, authorial, segmental, inclusive, emotional, anticipatory, source/material, functional, and formal completeness. It is proposed that the more of these aspects of completeness present in a work, the more complete the work will seem. Examples illustrating each of the different aspects of completeness are given.
The Canterbury Tales, by Geoffrey Chaucer, is examined with reference to the proposed aspects of completeness. The various ways in which the work can be and has been considered incomplete are discussed. The four fragmentary Tales in The Canterbury Tales--The Cook's Tale, The Squire's Tale, The Tale of Sir Thopas, and The Monk's Tale--are examined. First, the ways in which they can be considered incomplete are considered; next, the ways in which they can be considered complete despite being fragmentary are discussed.
The Canterbury Tales as a whole (if fragmentary) work is discussed. Its fragmentary nature is considered and possible explanations for difficulties are given. A case is made for considering The Canterbury Tales to be aesthetically complete and satisfying piece of literature as it stands.
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Hodder, Mike. "Petrarch in English : political, cultural and religious filters in the translation of the 'Rerum vulgarium fragmenta' and 'Triumphi' from Geoffrey Chaucer to J.M. Synge." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2013. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:49cdf913-cd2a-48c6-bf1e-533052018285.
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This thesis is concerned with one key aspect of the reception of the vernacular poetry of Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch), namely translations and imitations of the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta (Rvf) and Triumphi in English. It aims to provide a more comprehensive survey of the vernacular Petrarch’s legacy to English literature than is currently available, with a particular focus on some hitherto critically neglected texts and authors. It also seeks to ascertain to what degree the socio-historical phenomena of religion, politics, and culture have influenced the translations and imitations in question. The approach has been both chronological and comparative. This strategy will demonstrate with greater clarity the monumental effect of the Elizabethan Reformation on the English reception of Petrarch. It proposes a solution to the problem of the long gap between Geoffrey Chaucer’s re-writing of Rvf 132 and the imitations of Wyatt and Surrey framed in the context of Chaucer’s sophisticated imitative strategy (Chapter I). A fresh reading of Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella is offered which highlights the author’s misgivings about the dangers of textual misinterpretation, a concern he shared with Petrarch (Chapter II). The analysis of Edmund Spenser’s Amoretti and Epithalamion in the same chapter reveals a hitherto undetected Ovidian subtext to Petrarch’s Rvf 190. Chapter III deals with two English versions of the Triumphi: I propose a date for Lord Morley’s translation which suggests it may be the first post- Chaucerian English engagement with Petrarch; new evidence is brought to light which identifies the edition of Petrarch used by William Fowler as the source text for his Triumphs of Petrarcke. The fourth chapter constitutes the most extensive investigation to date of J. M. Synge’s engagement with the Rvf, and deals with the question of translation as subversion. On the theoretical front, it demonstrates how Synge’s use of “folk-speech” challenges Venuti’s binary foreignising/domesticating system of translation categorisation.
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Marcotte, Andrea. "Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales: Rhetoric and Gender in Marriage." ScholarWorks@UNO, 2007. http://scholarworks.uno.edu/td/591.
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In the Middle Ages, marriage represented a shift in the balance of power for both men and women. Struggling to define what constitutes the ideal marriage in medieval society, the marriage group of Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales attempts to reconcile the ongoing battle for sovereignty between husband and wife. Existing hierarchies restricted women; therefore, marriage fittingly presented more obstacles for women. Chaucer creates the dynamic personalities of the Wife of Bath, the Clerk and the Merchant to debate marriage intelligently while citing their experiences within marriage in their prologues. The rhetorical device of ethos plays a significant role for the pilgrims. By first establishing their authority, each pilgrim sets out to provide his or her audience with a tale of marriage that is most correct. Chaucer's work as a social commentary becomes rhetorically complex with varying levels of ethos between Chaucer the author, his tale tellers and their characters.
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Sandberg, Truedson J. ""What do the divils find to laugh about" in Melville's The Confidence-Man." BYU ScholarsArchive, 2018. https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/etd/6978.
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The failure of identity in The Confidence-Man has confounded readers since its publication. To some critics, Melville's titular character has seemed to leave his readers in a hopelessness without access to confidence, identity, trust, ethical relationality, and, finally, without anything to say. I argue, however, that Melville's text does not leave us without hope. My argument, consequently, is inextricably bound to a reading of Melville's text as deeply engaged with the concepts it inherits from Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, an inheritance woefully under-examined by those critics who would leave Melville's text in the mire of hopelessness. In examining how these two texts bind themselves together while simultaneously cutting against each other, my reading finds in The Confidence-Man an alternative way of responsibly living, one that eschews the fatal task of shoring up either our confidence or our embarrassment in favor of an inauthentic redeployment of identity that laughs at both the embarrassment in our confidence and the confidence in our embarrassment.
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Mattord, Carola Louise. "Lay Writers and the Politics of Theology in Medieval England From the Twelfth to Fifteenth Centuries." Digital Archive @ GSU, 2009. http://digitalarchive.gsu.edu/english_diss/44.
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This dissertation is a critical analysis of identity in literature within the historical context of the theopolitical climate in England between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries. The narratives under consideration are the Lais of Marie de France, The Canterbury Tales, and The Book of Margery Kempe. A focus on the business of theology and the Church’s political influence on identity will highlight these lay writers’ artistic shaping of theopolitical ideas into literature. Conducting a literary analysis on the application of theopolitical ideas by these lay writers encourages movement beyond the traditional exegetical interpretation of their narratives and furthers our determination of lay intellectual attitudes toward theology and its political purposes in the development of identity and society.
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Workman, Jameson Samuel. "Chaucerian metapoetics and the philosophy of poetry." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2011. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:8cf424fd-124c-4cb0-9143-e436c5e3c2da.
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This thesis places Chaucer within the tradition of philosophical poetry that begins in Plato and extends through classical and medieval Latin culture. In this Platonic tradition, poetry is a self-reflexive epistemological practice that interrogates the conditions of art in general. As such, poetry as metapoetics takes itself as its own object of inquiry in order to reinforce and generate its own definitions without regard to extrinsic considerations. It attempts to create a poetic-knowledge proper instead of one that is dependant on other modes for meaning. The particular manner in which this is expressed is according to the idea of the loss of the Golden Age. In the Augustinian context of Chaucer’s poetry, language, in its literal and historical signifying functions is an effect of the noetic fall and a deformation of an earlier symbolism. The Chaucerian poems this thesis considers concern themselves with the solution to a historical literary lament for language’s fall, a solution that suggests that the instability in language can be overcome with reference to what has been lost in language. The chapters are organized to reflect the medieval Neoplatonic ascensus. The first chapter concerns the Pardoner’s Old Man and his relationship to the literary history of Tithonus in which the renewing of youth is ironically promoted in order to perpetually delay eternity and make the current world co-eternal to the coming world. In the Miller’s Tale, more aggressive narrative strategies deploy the machinery of atheism in order to make a god-less universe the sufficient grounds for the transformation of a fallen and contingent world into the only world whatsoever. The Manciple’s Tale’s opposite strategy leaves the world intact in its current state and instead makes divine beings human. Phoebus expatriates to earth and attempts to co-mingle it with heaven in order to unify art and history into a single monistic experience. Finally, the Nun’s Priest’s Tale acts as ars poetica for the entire Chaucerian Performance and undercuts the naturalistic strategies of the first three poems by a long experiment in the philosophical conflict between art and history. By imagining art and history as epistemologically antagonistic it attempts to subdue in a definitive manner poetic strategies that would imagine human history as the necessary knowledge-condition for poetic language.
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Lamson, Morgen. "Boethian Colorings in Geoffrey Chaucer's Earlier Poetry: The Book of the Duchess, The Parliament of Fowls and The House of Fame." TopSCHOLAR®, 2007. http://digitalcommons.wku.edu/theses/431.
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There has been much written on Boethius and his impact on Chaucer's greater known works, such as The Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde, yet there has not been much light shone on his other works, namely The Book of the Duchess, The Parliament of Fowls, and The House of Fame, which are a rich mix of medieval conventions and Boethian elements and themes. Such ideas have been explored through the lenses of his five, shorter "Boethian lyrics" - "The Former Age," "Fortune," "Truth," "Gentilesse," and "Lak of Stedfastnesse" - particularly because it is within these five poems that the metafictional narrative approach or framing of Chaucer's Boethiusinfluenced work, through narration and possible consolations, are fleshed out and brought into focus. However, the "Boethian lyrics" are not necessary in the study of the three earlier poems The Book of the Duchess, The Parliament of Fowls, and The House of Fame. Using the convention of the frame tale with the dream vision in these three poems allows for the narrator to be brought to an understanding in each of these texts, strongly suggesting that this approach is something that Chaucer came across in Boethius's The Consolation of Philosophy. To merely go through and catalogue all Boethian elements as lifted directly from Consolation would accomplish nothing but a catalog of similarities. In that same vein, to analyze the "Boethian poems" would also be treading over familiar scholarly ground. In examining an intermediary group of texts as a bridge between Boethius's classical philosophy and Chaucer's courtly poetry, particularly The Book of the Duchess, The Parliament of Fowls and The House of Fame, this more concretely shows the extent of Boethius's coloring injected into Chaucer's writings from early in his writing career. Through close readings and secondary outside research, I am confident that another chapter of Chaucerian scholarship, one that has rarely been explored, much less written, can be added.
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Johnson, Travis William. "Affective communities: masculinity and the discourse of emotion in Middle English literature." Diss., University of Iowa, 2011. https://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/4860.
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Scholars have recently begun to reconsider the importance of emotions, suggesting that they are cultural constructions integral to human identity and social life. Most of these studies, however, have ignored the medieval period, focusing instead on the "civilizing process"--that is, the supposed development of social etiquette and self-restraint--that is assumed to have begun in the early modern period. This dissertation demonstrates that emotion was in fact a complex identity discourse well before the Renaissance and was fundamental to the construction of pre-modern social categories like gender. Exploring four masculine communities--clergymen, knights, university students, and merchants--I show that each community was shaped and constrained by a particular emotional ethos. Middle English poets were keenly aware of these constraints and their work often challenged the culture's emotional regimes.
I focus on literary texts from the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries because they were created during a time of heightened emphasis on the role of the emotions in shaping selves and communities. In the years after the Black Death, England witnessed significant demographic shifts and economic volatility that resulted in dramatic transformations in the nation's social landscape. Peasant rebellion, labor shortages, migrant clergy, and an influx of foreign merchants radically altered the structure of English society during these years. As a result, the institutions and ideologies that defined English masculine identity began changing in ways not seen before. Poets not surprisingly turned to the lexicon of emotion to negotiate these disruptions; in so doing, they offered English men new ways of understanding themselves in the face of rapid cultural change. The chapters examine a range of Middle English poems--the Alliterative Morte Arthure, St. Erkenwald, Chaucer's Reeve's Tale, and Lydgate's Bycorne and Chychevache--that illuminate particular emotions (anger, compassion, grief, and sorrow) and their significance to codes of masculinity. I argue that these four texts radically revised the forms and meanings of masculine emotional identity and community.
This dissertation demonstrates that Middle English poets recognized the transformative potential inherent in the lexicon of emotion and used it to reshape their audiences' understanding of critical cultural problems. The years from the 1350s to the 1450s were important not only in the emerging tradition of poetry in English, but also for the development of the language and psychology of emotion. As poets tried to come to terms with great social changes, they molded and manipulated the discourse of emotion to interrogate what it meant to be a man in late medieval England. Affective Communities reveals the importance of emotions as markers of gender and community and shows literature's role in responding to and imagining social change.
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Rodriguez, Joseph Paul. "Rise and fall: tropes of verticality in Middle English literature." Diss., University of Iowa, 2012. https://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/1387.
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While excellent scholarly work exists on medieval space, especially in cultural geography, no book-length study of the conceptual implications of medieval vertical space exists. Attention has been lavished on the surface of the medieval world, while the heights go unseen and the depths go unplumbed. Using theories of space by scholars such as Henri Lefebvre and Jacques Le Goff, this project explores this lacuna through close reading of three late medieval English texts. The emphasis within Christian theology on a vertically-oriented model of virtue and the afterlife (ascending to Heaven, falling to Hell) was likely the initial reason for the prominence of verticality in the Middle Ages; the work of religious writers such as Bernard of Clairvaux and Walter Hilton set the stage for an explosion of the vertical imagination, as a blossoming of the incredible variety of what could be called "vertical thought." These ideas foreshadowed and accompanied similar developments in the secular arena, soon becoming an integral part of medieval life. By the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, closely interrelated--and strongly vertical--frameworks arose to structure complex concepts such as moral virtue, social class and kinship relations. The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries saw several major developments in what can be called "vertical thought." The evolution of Augustinian ideas of religion and morality led to a nuanced vertical hierarchy of virtues and vices, while the rise of the middle class helped define the explicit division of class into vertical tiers. A shift in conceptions of kinship, from a synchronous network to a diachronic tree of ancestry, affected perceptions of gender and family. Finally, the growth of parliamentary and urban political capital in late medieval England, especially in response to the reign of child-king Henry VI, led to a battle of wills between the powerful men of London and their king.
These concerns with verticality were not limited to the realms of religious belief or temporal power, but manifested themselves in medieval literature and iconography as well. Highness and lowness feature in the plots, characters, and settings of many texts, and tropes of height and depth and rising and falling make frequent appearances textually and visually. Depictions of Heaven and Hell, for example, frequently make use of height and depth, and instances such as the Virgin Mary's ascension to Heaven or Lucifer's fall from Heaven to Hell involve explicitly vertical movement which parallels the perceived virtue of said figures. The Jesse tree, a genealogy of Christ, is usually illustrated as a tree emerging from a recumbent man's body, and reflects a newly vertical visualization of familial ties, while the concept of degree or scale, often represented as a ladder or stairs, is explicitly used as a framework for both moral virtue and socioeconomic status. Through discussion of three specific medieval tropes in literature and art-- the tree of Jesse in Chaucer's Merchant's Tale, the Dead Sea in Cleanness, and the giant of Lydgate's Triumphal Entry of Henry VI--this project attempts to demonstrate the importance of verticality in late medieval English literature from 1300-1500 and show how these tropes responded to and influenced changes in the way medieval, and modern, audiences perceived social class, kinship, politics, and religion.
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Santos, Spenser. "Translating the past: medieval English Exodus narratives." Diss., University of Iowa, 2019. https://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/7026.
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My dissertation takes a translation studies approach to four medieval works that are both translations and depictions of translation in metaphorical senses (namely, migration and spiritual transformation/conversion): the Exodus of the Old English Illustrated Hexateuch, the Old English verse Exodus, Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale, and the Exodus of the Middle English Metrical Paraphrase of the Old Testament. I approach these narratives through a lens of modern translation theory, while at the same time, I investigate the texts with an eye toward classical and medieval theories of translation as espoused by Jerome, Augustine, and King Alfred. By examining these works through a diachronical lens of translation, I show how understanding medieval translation practice can inform our understanding of how the English conceived of themselves in the Middle Ages.
The origins of England, or of English Christianity, were a recurring theme throughout the Middle Ages, and the texts in this dissertation all materially touch on narratives related to those origins. The two Old English Exodus translations participate in an early English literary trend that deploys the Exodus narrative as part of a fantasy of re-casting the English takeover of Britain as establishing a new chosen people. This populus israhel mythos, as Andrew Scheil terms it, served as a common thread in Anglo-Saxon self-mythology. In the Middle English period, Chaucer’s revisits the origins of English Christianity in the Man of Law’s Tale, a tale that involves numerous sea-crossings and the unveiling of the hidden inclination toward Christianity among the people of England. Meanwhile, the Exodus of the Middle English Metrical Paraphrase of the Old Testament touches less on English origins and reveals more the emerging English sense of whiteness as a racial category. By exploring the nascent notions of whiteness and its (in)applicability to Moses and Jews at large in the text, I examine how the poet of the Paraphrase was able to call upon contemporary concerns about race and participate in establishing, through difference to the Jews, the idea of English whiteness.
Translation was a major component of the development of English literary sensibility and thus the emerging sense of what Englishness is. It is particularly important that these translations narrate versions of the past because the ability to re-shape the past for a present need allowed the English to take ownership of history, just as Augustine’s image of the Israelites taking ownership of the Egyptian treasure after the crossing of the Red Sea sees the Egyptian past superseded by the Hebrews (and the Hebrews superseded by Christianity, following Augustine’s argument). By taking up the treasures of the past on the shoreline of the present, English translators assumed a right of ownership over history and how to use it. Through representations of the past in translation, the English developed a sense of English-ness that they would then export globally. I demonstrate that by translating texts that deal with migrations, conversion, and the origins of the Israelites and of the peoples of the British Isles, the English crafted for themselves an image, a history, a literature that grows and thrives to this day.
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Nafde, Aditi. "Deciphering the manuscript page : the mise-en-page of Chaucer, Gower, and Hoccleve Manuscripts." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2012. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:b2c67783-b797-494a-b792-368c14d1fe49.
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This thesis examines the production of the Middle English poetic manuscript. It analyses the mise-en-page of manuscripts created during a crucial period for book production, immediately after 1400, when there was a sudden explosion in the production of vernacular manuscripts of literary texts, when the demand for books increased, and the commercial book trade swiftly followed. It offers a close analysis of the mise-en-page of the manuscripts of three central authors: Chaucer’s, Gower’s, and Hoccleve’s manuscripts were at the heart of this sudden flourishing and were, crucially, produced when scribal methods for creating the literary page were still unformed. Previous studies have focused on the localised readings produced by single scribes, manuscripts, or authors, offering a limited examination of broader trends. This study offers a wider comparison: where individual studies offer localised analysis, the multi-textuality of this thesis offers broader perceptions of book production and of scribal responses to the new literary texts being produced. In analysing the layout of seventy-six manuscripts, including borders, initials, paraphs, rubrics, running titles, speaker markers, glosses and notes, this thesis argues that scribes were deeply concerned with creating a manuscript page specifically to showcase texts of poetry. The introduction outlines current scholarship on mise-en-page and defines the scribe as one who offers an individual response to the text on the page within the context of the inherited, commercial, and practical practices of layout. The three analytical chapters address the placement of the features of mise-en-page in each of the seventy-six manuscripts, each chapter offering three contrasting manuscript situations. Chapter 1 analyses the manuscripts of Chaucer, who left no plan for the look of his page, causing scribes to make decisions on layout that illuminate fifteenth-century scribal responses to literature. These are then compared to the manuscripts of Gower in Chapter 2, directly or indirectly supervised by the poet, which display rigorous uniformity in their layout. This chapter argues that scribes responded in much the same way, despite the strict control over meaning. Chapter 3 focuses on Hoccleve’s autograph manuscripts which are unique in demonstrating authorial control over layout. This chapter compares the autograph to the non-autograph manuscripts to argue that scribal responses differed from authorial intentions. Each of the three chapters analyses the development of mise-en-page specifically for literary texts. Focussing on the mise-en-page, this thesis is able to compare across a range of texts, manuscripts, scribes, and authors to mount a substantial challenge to current perceptions that poetic manuscripts were laid out in order to assist readers’ understanding of the meaning of the texts they contain. Instead, it argues that though there was a concern with representing the nuances of poetic meaning, often scribal responses to poetry were bound up with presenting poetic form.
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Brandon, Robert R. II. ""And Gladly Wolde He Teche": Chaucer's Use of Source Materials in the "Clerk's Tale."." Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University, 2003. https://dc.etsu.edu/etd/748.
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Few of Chaucer’s works provoke such animosity as does his “Clerk’s Tale.” Modern critics are divided by the social and gender issues that to which the tale lends itself. However, the tale was immensely popular to Middle Age audiences and was one of the best loved of the Canterbury Tales. Therefore, to dismiss this tale’s literary values outright, as some critics have done, is a mistake. By examining the history of the Griselda story, Chaucer’s use of his source materials, and the tales placement within the Canterbury Tales, this thesis is an attempt to examine the tale in more culturally, religiously, and historically appropriate way.
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Marsland, Rebecca Louise Katherine. "Complaint in Scotland c.1424- c.1500." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:05468bd1-c936-426f-9ab4-79afb94a59fb.
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This thesis provides the first account of complaint in Older Scots literature. It argues for the coherent development of a distinctively Scottish complaining voice across the fifteenth century, characterised by an interest in the relationship between amatory and ethical concerns, between stasis and narrative movement, and between male and female voices. Chapter 1 examines the literary contexts of Older Scots complaint, and identifies three paradigmatic texts for the Scottish complaint tradition: Ovid’s Heroides; Boethius’s De Consolatione Philosophiae; and Alan of Lille’s De Planctu Naturae. Chapter 2 concentrates on the complaints in Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Arch. Selden. B. 24 (c. 1489-c. 1513). It considers afresh the Scottish reception of Lydgate’s Complaint of the Black Knight and Chaucer’s Anelida and Arcite, and also offers original readings of three Scottish complaints preserved uniquely in this manuscript: the Lay of Sorrow, the Lufaris Complaynt, and the Quare of Jelusy. Chapter 3 focuses on the relationship between complaint and narrative, arguing that the complaints included in the Buik of Alexander (c. 1438), Lancelot of the Laik (c. 1460), Hary’s Wallace (c. 1476-8), and The Buik of King Alexander the Conquerour (c. 1460-99) act as catalysts for narrative movement and subvert the complaint’s traditional identity as a static form. Chapter 4 is a study of complaint in Robert Henryson’s three major works: the Morall Fabillis (c. 1480s); the Testament of Cresseid (c. 1480-92); and Orpheus and Eurydice (c. 1490-2), and argues that Henryson consistently connects the complaint form with the concept of self-knowledge as part of wider discourses on effective governance. Chapter 5 presents the evidence that a text’s identity as a complaint influenced its presentation in both manuscript and print witnesses. The witnesses under discussion date predominantly from the sixteenth century; the chapter thus also uses them to explore the complaints’ later reception history.
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Langdell, Sebastian James. "Religious reform, transnational poetics, and literary tradition in the work of Thomas Hoccleve." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:a2e8eb46-5d08-405d-baa9-24e0400a47d8.
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This study considers Thomas Hoccleve’s role, throughout his works, as a “religious” writer: as an individual who engages seriously with the dynamics of heresy and ecclesiastical reform, who contributes to traditions of vernacular devotional writing, and who raises the question of how Christianity manifests on personal as well as political levels – and in environments that are at once London-based, national, and international. The chapters focus, respectively, on the role of reading and moralization in the Series; the language of “vice and virtue” in the Epistle of Cupid; the moral version of Chaucer introduced in the Regiment of Princes; the construction of the Hoccleve persona in the Regiment; and the representation of the Eucharist throughout Hoccleve’s works. One main focus of the study is Hoccleve’s mediating influence in presenting a moral version of Chaucer in his Regiment. This study argues that Hoccleve’s Chaucer is not a pre-established artifact, but rather a Hocclevian invention, and it indicates the transnational literary, political, and religious contexts that align in Hoccleve’s presentation of his poetic predecessor. Rather than posit the Hoccleve-Chaucer relationship as one of Oedipal anxiety, as other critics have done, this study indicates the way in which Hoccleve’s Chaucer evolves in response to poetic anxiety not towards Chaucer himself, but rather towards an increasingly restrictive intellectual and ecclesiastical climate. This thesis contributes to the recently revitalized critical dialogue surrounding the role and function of fifteenth-century English literature, and the effect on poetry of heresy, the church’s response to heresy, and ecclesiastical reform both in England and in Europe. It also advances critical narratives regarding Hoccleve’s response to contemporary French poetry; the role of confession, sacramental discourse, and devotional images in Hoccleve’s work; and Hoccleve’s impact on literary tradition.
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Fisher, Leona C. "Fortune Personified and the Fall (and Rise) of Women in Chaucer's Monk's Tale and the Autobiographical Writings of Christine de Pizan." Diss., CLICK HERE for online access, 2005. http://contentdm.lib.byu.edu/ETD/image/etd848.pdf.
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Falk, Seb. "Improving instruments : equatoria, astrolabes, and the practices of monastic astronomy in late medieval England." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2016. https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/256996.
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Histories of medieval astronomy have brought to light a rich textual tradition, of treatises and tables composed and computed, transmitted and translated across Europe and beyond. These have been supplemented by fruitful inquiry into the material culture of astronomy, especially the instruments that served as models of the heavens, for teaching and for practical purposes. But even now we know little about the practices of medieval astronomers: how they obtained and passed on their knowledge; how they drew up and used mathematical tables; how they drafted the treatises in which they found words to express their ideas and inventions for their particular audiences. This thesis uses a case study approach to elucidate these medieval astronomical practices. Long thought to be a holograph manuscript in the hand of Geoffrey Chaucer, the Equatorie of the Planetis (Peterhouse, Cambridge MS 75.I) has recently been identified as the work of John Westwyk (d. c. 1400), a Benedictine monk of Tynemouth Priory and St Albans Abbey. His draft description of the construction and use of an astronomical instrument, with accompanying tables, provides an opportunity to reconstruct the practices of an unexceptional astronomer. The first chapter of this thesis reconstructs Westwyk’s astronomical reading and understanding, through an examination of the other manuscript that survives in his hand: a pair of instrument treatises by the outstanding monastic astronomer Richard of Wallingford. I show how Westwyk copied this manuscript in a monastic context, learning as he annotated texts and recomputed tables. In the second chapter I discuss the purposes of planetary instruments such as equatoria, their place among other astronomical instruments, and the physical constraints and possibilities experienced by their makers. Through this discussion I assess the craft environment in which Westwyk came to write his own instrument-making instructions. Chapters three and four assess Westwyk’s language, explaining the basis for his choice to write a technical work in the vernacular, and analysing how his innovative use of Middle English furthered his didactic objectives. In the final chapter, I undertake a technical reassessment of the Equatorie treatise, an integrated analysis of the instrument with the somewhat neglected tables that Westwyk compiled alongside it. The thesis thus applies a range of methodologies to examine the practices and products of a single inexpert astronomer from all angles. It aims to show what an in-depth case study approach can offer historians of the medieval sciences.
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Psonak, Kevin Damien. "The long line of the Middle English alliterative revival : rhythmically coherent, metrically strict, phonologically English." Thesis, 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/2152/ETD-UT-2012-05-5044.
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This study contributes to the search for metrical order in the 90,000 extant long lines of the late fourteenth-century Middle English Alliterative Revival. Using the 'Gawain'-poet's 'Patience' and 'Cleanness', it refutes nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholars who mistook rhythmic liveliness for metrical disorganization and additionally corrects troubling missteps that scholars have taken over the last five years. 'Chapter One: Tame the "Gabble of Weaker Syllables"' rehearses the traditional, but mistaken view that long lines are barely patterned at all. It explains the widely-accepted methods for determining which syllables are metrically stressed and which are not: Give metrical stress to the syllables that in everyday Middle English were probably accented. 'Chapter Two: An Environment for Demotion in the B-Verse' introduces the relatively stringent metrical template of the b-verse as a foil for the different kind of meter at work in the a-verse. 'Chapter Three: Rhythmic Consistency in the Middle English Alliterative Long Line' examines the structure of the a-verse and considers the viability of verses with more than the normal two beats. An empirical investigation considers whether rhythmic consistency in the long line depends on three-beat a-verses. 'Chapter Four: Dynamic "Unmetre" and the Proscription against Three Sequential Iambs' posits an explanation for the unusual distributions of metrically unstressed syllables in the long line and finds that the 'Gawain'-poet's rhythms avoid the even alternation of beats and offbeats with uncanny precision. 'Chapter Five: Metrical Promotion, Linguistic Promotion, and False Extra-Long Dips' takes the rest of the dissertation as a foundation for explaining rhythmically puzzling a-verses. A-verses that seem to have excessively long sequences of offbeats and other a-verses that infringe on b-verse meter prove amenable to adjustment through metrical promotion. 'Conclusion: Metrical Regions in the Long Line' synthesizes the findings of the previous chapters in a survey of metrical tension in the long line. It additionally articulates the key theme of the dissertation: Contrary to traditional assumptions, Middle English alliterative long lines have variable, instead of consistent, numbers of beats and highly regulated, instead of liberally variable, arrangements of metrically unstressed syllables.text
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(11186181), Christina M. McCarter. "HINGED, BOUND, COVERED: THE SIGNIFYING POTENTIAL OF THE MATERIAL CODEX." Thesis, 2021.
Find full textAbstract:
The idea of “the
book” overflows with extraneous significance: books are presented as windows,
gateways, vessels, lighthouses, and gardens. Books speak to us and feed us, and
they are a method of escape. The book has long represented much more than a
static, hinged, bound, covered object inscribed with words. Even when a book is
not performing an elaborate, imaginative function, the word “book” very often
signifies the text it holds or even the text’s author: You can open The Bluest Eye or carry Toni Morrison in
your bag. Fourteenth-century author Geoffrey Chaucer invokes a “book” by
“Lollius” as authoritative source of his
Troilus and Criseyde, though no person exists; likewise, to conclude the
same text, Chaucer asks directs his project to “go, litel bok, go.” When a book
makes an appearance in narrative, it is rarely just a book—without legs, the book moves, and without breath, it
lives. This dissertation asks what about the shape of the codex has helped the
book become such a metaphorically rich signifier.
This dissertation attempts to unravel the various threads of meaning that make up the complex “idea of the book.” I focus on one of these threads: the book as a material object. By focusing on how the book as object—not the book as idea—functions within narrative, I argue that we can identify what about the book object enables its metaphorical range. I analyze moments in literature, television, and film when metaphorical functions are assigned, not to an ephemeral, complex idea of the book, but rather to the material realities of the book as an object. In these moments, the codex’s essential, material shape (what I am calling its bookishness) enables metaphorical functioning; I show that, by examining when mundanely physical bindings, pages, covers, and spines initiate metaphorical action, we can identify how the material book has come to mean so much more than itself.
Indeed, despite a renewed appreciation for the book as both material and cultural object, books have become so significantly meaningful that attempts to define “the book” evade simplicity, rendering books as everything and nothing at the same time. My inquire explores this complexity by starting with a simple premise: Metaphors are based on some element of physical truth. Though the book has sprouted in a variety of metaphorical directions, many of those metaphors are grounded in the book’s material realities. Acknowledging this, especially in an age of fast-evolving media and bookish fetishism, offers a valuable and novel perspective on how and why books are both semantically rich and culturally valued objects.