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Bigley, Michael Erik. "Musicality, subjectivity, and the Canterbury tales." CONNECT TO THIS TITLE ONLINE, 2007. http://etd.lib.umt.edu/theses/available/etd-05312007-110614.
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Ganze, Alison. "Seeking Trouthe in Chaucer's Canterbury tales /." view abstract or download file of text, 2004. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/uoregon/fullcit?p3153784.
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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2004.Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 176-194). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.
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Garcia, Mariechristine. "Explorations of Women's Narrative Agency in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales." Scholarship @ Claremont, 2019. https://scholarship.claremont.edu/cmc_theses/2155.
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This paper explores the extent to which the female characters in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales exercise any degree of narrative agency. Using both literary and historical approaches, this paper specifically discusses the cases of three of Chaucer’s women: Virginia, Griselda, and the Wife of Bath.
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Hendricks, Thomas J. "Astrology in the Canterbury Tales Vol. I." The Ohio State University, 1987. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1487327695621486.
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Kurtz, Heidi. "Stress, etymology and metre in four Canterbury Tales." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2013. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.605566.
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This thesis investigates the prosody of Middle English and how the rhythmic structures of the language are manifested in metrical verse. I examine how tension is created through the matching or mis-matching of lexical stress with the expected metrical template and test an analysis proposed here to empirically measure different degrees of tension in verse. The analysis is applied to four selected tales from the Hengwrt manuscript of Chaucer's Canterburry Tales, as well as to selections of verse with known metrical structures from later periods of English in order to corroborate the analysis results with a series of control samples. The aim is to examine the metrical structure of Chaucer's verse in relation to how sequences Of lexically stressed syllables, syllable sequences based on the stress patterns in polysyllabic words, tit between the metrical boundaries of line beginnings and line ends. I ask if there is a correlation between the best-fit of lexical stress sequences and what has been established about the poem's metrical structure without violating that structure. It is this degree of correlation that gives a measure of metrical tension. The methodology developed for this analysis involves identifying the etymological origin and, in turn, the lexical stress pattern of each word in the text, then substituting the resulting lexis with either etymological or stress markers. This allows both the lexical stress and etymological patterns to be mapped throughout the text. After the words in the texts were substituted with their corresponding markers, a sub-corpus of purely Germanic lines, in which lexical stress is marc stable in late Middle English, is identified and analysed for comparison alongside the complete texts. 10 addition to the lexical stress test, a test is carried out on the lines after the stress substitution, confirming the degree to which they had a predominantly iambic rhythm. The results from the etymological analysis are striking. The etymological analysis shows that the placement of Latinate words is greatest at line-final and pre-caesural positions, and that that there are correlative concentrations of Germanic vocabulary at line-initial and post-caesural positions. The mirroring of Latinate and Germanic concentrations of vocabulary at caesural positions gives additional evidence to support the metrical role of caesura I marks within the Hengwrt manuscript, despite the fact that the marks were added by a later hand. The results of the analysis provide clear evidence for the existence of caesura in verse. The results of the stress analysis arc more problematic. On closer examination, the methodology for identifying label ling mismatches across the lines suffered from a lack of specificity. The analysis showed a slight preference for s-initial stress feet which could be used to indicate a degree of tension or counterpoint in verse. The results arc made more meaningful by associating specific mismatches with specific positions in the lines. In light of this, several suggestions were made on how the analysis could be improved and used to identify bracketing mismatches across the lines. The modified analysis will allow us to objectively quantify the tensions that arise between the interaction of trochaic and iambic lexical patterns and the metrical template of a given text. The approach developed in this thesis, j believe, brings us closer to answering the question to what degree has a poet developed metrical tension in his or her verse, and how has that tension been manifested while at the same time fulfilling metrical expectations.
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Yankoviak, Michael Robert. "Chaucer and Social Discontent in the Canterbury Tales." The Ohio State University, 1994. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1391765600.
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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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Goodwin, Amy W. "Reading the Canterbury tales : the example of Chaucer's clerk /." The Ohio State University, 1990. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1487678444258544.
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Wu, Hsiang-mei. "Chaucer and prejudices : a critical study of 'The Canterbury Tales'." Thesis, University of Sussex, 2015. http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/58523/.
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This thesis investigates the prejudices in Geoffrey Chaucer‘s The Canterbury Tales. There are thirty pilgrims and twenty-two tales in this grand work. As it is unlikely to discuss all of them in one thesis, I focus my research on four pilgrims—the Miller, the Prioress, the Wife of Bath, and the Pardoner—to demonstrate Chaucer‘s prejudices in various aspects. The chapter on the Miller analyzes how men and women interact in sexual terms in the public domains and private spaces, investigating the poet‘s sexual discrimination in his final distribution of punishments for the characters as well as his chauvinistic disregard of the female body and its autonomy; Chaucer‘s punishment is not entirely of 'poetic justice' as it is dispensed at the cost of class victimization and the vilification of the female body. The Prioress‘s chapter discusses the poet‘s prejudices against female religious, exploring how Chaucer is affected by conventional descriptions of courtly ladies and contemporary conception of female religious‘ sexuality when he contradictorily glosses the Prioress as a romantic beauty; Chaucer‘s language prejudice and his innuendo of the Prioress‘s sexual attraction reflect his contempt and mis-evaluation of the Prioress‘s status, social function, and professional abilities. The chapter on the Wife of Bath examines 'The Wife of Bath‘s Prologue' as a manifestation of a medieval woman‘s life education, demonstrating how Alisoun is molded by mercantile marriage transactions, the tradition of misogyny, and the auctoritees‘ ill-meant religious instruction through garbled texts; the Wife‘s deafness does not signify her resistance or inability to understand men‘s 'truth', but an undeserved punishment from her frustrated educators. The Pardoner‘s chapter examines the Pardoner as a feminized and marginalized figure, exhibiting the narrator‘s, the Host‘s, and the Canterbury pilgrims‘ fear and hate of the 'different', the 'perverse', and the non-heterosexual; the Pardoner is treated as 'Other' of the Canterbury group and is brutally 'Othered' by the pilgrims despite his efforts in heterosexual identity and conformity. My study of Chaucer‘s prejudices will naturally extend to the investigations of modern readers‘ prejudices, particularly critics‘ false interpretation of the Miller‘s Alisoun‘s 'escape', denial of the Prioress‘s beauty, misconception of Jankyn‘s violence, and unconscious siding with patriarchy in the 'Othering' of the Pardoner, among others.
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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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Brooks, Freya Elizabeth Paintin. "The female audience of the manuscripts of Chaucer's 'Canterbury Tales'." Thesis, University of Leicester, 2018. http://hdl.handle.net/2381/42403.
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This thesis revisits the manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales in order to piece together the evidence of women’s involvement in the consumption and circulation of this work. The Canterbury Tales is often overlooked as a part of the literary diet of late medieval women. However, the background context of women’s literacy and book usage suggests that fifteenth- and sixteenth-century women had both the ability to read and the potential to be interested in the work. This thesis uses a new large-scale approach to the extant eighty-three manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales in order to select a corpus with which to work and begins with an investigation of the internal and external evidence that indicates women used the manuscripts. It develops a new methodology and visualisations to map the social networks of women connected to the manuscripts and explores the localisation of each book in the select corpus to investigate how it affects these networks. This thesis finds evidence that women used the manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales in an informal way, and the books were potentially kept in close proximity at home. Affluence is a common factor between these women, and they had social and familial connections to other owners of the work, implying participation in a network of awareness of the text. Late medieval and early modern women appear to play a more significant role in the consumption and circulation of the Canterbury Tales than at first expected. Book transmission is not always linear, and the mapping of networks with visualisations has aided in understanding the women who may have used these books. Ultimately, this thesis provides a new perspective on how the Canterbury Tales transcends a network of geographical and gender boundaries.
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Honeyman, Chelsea. "Narrative flexibility and fraternal preaching technique in three "Canterbury Tales"." Thesis, University of Ottawa (Canada), 2004. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/26658.
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A divide exists between those who view the Canterbury Tales as a series of self-contained texts and those who contend that the various characters' interactions affect each tale's direction. This paper takes the latter view, using the contemporary preaching attitudes of Chaucer's day to examine how the Pardoner's, Prioress's and Friar's respective levels of consideration for their situation and audience are directly related to their tales' success. While the Pardoner's self-absorption and over-dependence on his professional habits and the Prioress's favouring of sentimentality at the expense of engagement with her tale and audience result in less-than-popular narratives, the Friar's use of fraternal preaching techniques emphasising an adaptable, audience-centred style leads him to greater success with the pilgrims. Chaucer's advocacy of narrative flexibility may be part of his overall goal with the Canterbury Tales: to create a written text that replicates as much as possible the spontaneous nature of oral performance.
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Farmer, Jennifer R. "Queering canterbury." Honors in the Major Thesis, University of Central Florida, 2008. http://digital.library.ucf.edu/cdm/ref/collection/ETH/id/1079.
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This item is only available in print in the UCF Libraries. If this is your Honors Thesis, you can help us make it available online for use by researchers around the world by following the instructions on the distribution consent form at http://library.ucf.edu/Systems/DigitalInitiatives/DigitalCollections/InternetDistributionConsentAgreementForm.pdf You may also contact the project coordinator, Kerri Bottorff, at kerri.bottorff@ucf.edu for more information.Bachelors
Arts and Humanities
English Literature
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Thorpe, J. "Editing the sectional rubrics of Piers Plowman and the Canterbury Tales." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2006. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.439327.
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Richardson-Hay, C. "The descriptive art of the general prologue to the Canterbury Tales." Thesis, University of York, 1986. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.375431.
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Thompson, Nigel Stuart. "Love's debate : a comparative study of the Decameron and the Canterbury Tales." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1991. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.315944.
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Thaisen, Jacob Ronnow. "Studies in the Orthography of Some Early Manuscripts of Chaucer's 'Canterbury tales'." Thesis, De Montfort University, 2005. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.502580.
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The systems of spelling found in the extant manuscripts of a late Middle English text are rarely considered in discussions of the transmission of that text. If they are, scholars have typically used the occurrence of dialectal spellings to allocate manuscripts to geographical areas or the occurrence of identical spellings, often unusual spellings, in corresponding locations across the manuscripts to recover the usage of the presumed archetype. The basis for much of this scholarship has been profiles which rely upon text samples or which list what spellings are found in a manuscript but do not reveal the internal distribution of these spellings in that manuscript. This study considers the spelling and codicology of nine complete, textuallyimportant manuscripts of Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, each of which was copied by a different scribe. The author semi-automatically indexes the electronic transcripts prepared by the Canterbury Tales Project from the spellings registered in the Project spelling databases for one of the tales. He extracts a comprehensive spelling profile for each manuscript from this index. The profiles correspond to the questionnaire used for Angus McIntosh, M.L. Samuels, et aI., A Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English (Aberdeen, 1986).
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Klerks, Suzanne (Suzanne Elizabeth) Carleton University Dissertation English. "The Making of a monster; the female grotesque in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales." Ottawa, 1992.
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Zbirat, Abdelkader. "Techniques narratives dans les canterbury tales et les mille et une nuits." Amiens, 1994. http://www.theses.fr/1994AMIE0009.
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Les canterbury tales et les mille et une nuits ont marque l'histoire litteraire pendant plus de sept siecles. Leurs differentes techniques narratives ont fait couler beaucoup d'encre, et pourtant le mystere et le charme narratifs des deux oeuvres restent toujours sans reponses et sans approches purement adequates. La presente these essaie d'apporter un peu plus de reponses et d'interpretations aux techniques les plus caracterstiques des deux oeuvres. Tous les efforts se sont reunis autour de la technique la plus appreciee des contes : celle de l'enchasse ou de ce que les anglais appellent "the device of a story within another story". Suivent ensuite les personnages dont l'importance est de generer et de donner plus de souffle aux intrigues des differentes histoires, car les hommes, a leur tour, servent de moyens stylistiques. Ils sont parfois employes dans le seul but de motiver une action trop lente ou trop improbable. On en trouve meme des personnages qu'on peut qualifier d'operateurs selement. Certains operent de facon permanente, d'autres servent d'operateurs provoires leur seule tache est de quitter le circuit narratif chaque fois qu'ils ont accompli leurs roles. Les canterbury tales et les mille et une nuits partagent plus d'une technique narrative, alors que ce sont deux oeuvres qui ne se connaissent pas du tout. Comment cela a-t-il pu arriver? etait un simple hasard, ou, est-ce que les lettres et conteurs de l'epoque allaient a la meme ecole ?For more than seven centuries, the canterbury tales and the one thousand and one nights have been influencing literature. Much has been said of their narrative techniques, and yet, their mysterious way of repoting things of the past remains far away from quenching the thirst of the really interested reader or student. Through the present work, we are trying to find other answers and other interpretatations to the most caracteristic technique and devices of the two collections. Much attention and care have been given to the device of "embedding", what the english call "the device of a story within another story". Then we have characters whose importance is often to motivate, and generate some more breath in the different stories ; because, characters, in their turn, are sometimes stylistic devices themselves. Not only do they add spices to aching plots, but they often act as operators only. Some of them are so lucky that they are given permanent tasks and role to fufill in the plot. Others are provisional operators only. Their duty is to leave the action and the plot as sonns as they have accomplished their role. The canterbury tales and the one thousand and one nights share more than one narrative technique, and yet they don't know each other. How did it happen ? did the english and the arabian taletellers go to the same school ?
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Da, Rold Orietta. "A study of Cambridge University Library, MS.Dd.424 of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales." Thesis, De Montfort University, 2002. http://hdl.handle.net/2086/13270.
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Kraishan, Majed R. "Sex and the (hetero) erotic in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde." Thesis, Bangor University, 2013. https://research.bangor.ac.uk/portal/en/theses/sex-and-the-hetero-erotic-in-chaucers-canterbury-tales-and-troilus-and-criseyde(e2adc604-4531-4f3e-970e-fe7f1840d7aa).html.
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Stubbs, Estelle Vivien. "A study of the codicology of four early manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales." Thesis, University of Sheffield, 2006. http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/15177/.
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This thesis is a study of the physical features of the four earliest manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales all dated to the first years after the death of Geoffrey Chaucer. I assess the ways in which codicological examination can contribute to the understanding of a complex textual tradition and inform the study of the text. The thesis is divided into two volumes. The first volume contains the seven chapters which make up the thesis. The first chapter contains a review of the printed editions of the poem since Caxton's first edition of 1476 and a summary of the most important contributions of scholarship in the twentieth century. It reveals that many influential editions and much scholarship on the textual tradition of the poem have been achieved with scant consultation of the extant manuscripts. The second chapter addresses the problems which have arisen as a result of this neglect and offers suggestions for a different approach to manuscript analysis which will be provided as a result of the examination of the manuscripts in the remainder of the thesis. Chapters three to six contain detailed analyses of the four manuscripts in the survey: Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales MS. Peniarth 392D (Hengwrt), Oxford, Corpus Christi College, MS. 198 (Corpus), London, British Library MS. Harley 7334 (Harley 4), and California, San Marino, Huntington Library MS. El. 26 C 9 (Ellesmere). In chapter seven, I summarise the findings and offer suggestions for future research. The second volume contains all the appendices numbered 1-20 followed by 22 Plates. For each manuscript there are four or five separate appendices which provide details of the following: a visual overview, a detailed analysis of individual quires, a list of all rubrics, lines added, omitted or variant in each manuscript, and a list of catchwords.
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Bordalejo, Barbara. "The manuscript source of Caxton's second edition of the 'Canterbury Tales' and its place in the textual tradition of the 'Tales'." Thesis, De Montfort University, 2002. http://hdl.handle.net/2086/6253.
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For many years, scholars have thought that the manuscript source used by William Caxton to correct his first edition of the Canterbury Tales was a manuscript probably of the very best quality. In 1939, Thomas Dunn wrote a doctoral thesis on the subject, and for his research he used the Manly and Rickert collation cards. Technological advances made in the last decade of the twentieth century have made it possible to collate the witnesses of the Tales using computerised tools. This work presents an analysis of the stemmatically significant variants found in Cx2 and attempts to offer a plausible hypothesis concerning the position of the manuscript source of Cx2 in the textual tradition of the Canterbury Tales. This thesis is organised in eight chapters. Chapter 1 focuses on the scholarly work surrounding Caxton's second edition and his editorial practices; chapter 2 contains the bibliographical description of one of the copies of Cx2; chapter 3 studies the question of the order of the tales; chapter 4 offers a synthesis of what, for the purposes of this particular research, is understood as a textual variant; in chapters 5,6 and 7 the analyses of the data and some partial conclusions can be found. The findings of this work appear in the conclusions (chapter 8). There is an electronic appendix to this work in which data that were not deemed essential to its understanding can be found. The electronic appendix includes the complete collation of Cx2 against Cxl, collations of all the available witnesses and variants which were considered repetitive or uninformative. This work shows that witnesses of the text which have remained unclassified up to this point might be genetically related. Especially evident is the relationship between Ad3 Ch Ha4 and the manuscript source of W. It also appears that Cx2 shares with El and Gg variants which originated below the archetype. This thesis suggests that more work is required in order to clarify the stemmatic relations in the textual tradition of the Canterbury Tales.
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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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Johns, Alessa. "Joyce and Chaucer : the historical significance of similarities between Ulysses and the Canterbury tales." Thesis, McGill University, 1985. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=63365.
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Thomson, Claire Elizabeth. "A transcription and study of British Library MS. Lansdowne 851 of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales." Thesis, University of Sheffield, 1998. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.299595.
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British Library MS. Lansdowne 851 has never been viewed as central to the Canterbury Tales tradition and only two hypotheses regarding its priority within the transmission of the poem have ever been proposed: I) that La and Cp shared the same exemplar or sets of exemplars, and 2) that La is a direct copy of Cpo This thesis aims to provide a comprehensive analysis and description of La and to review in detail its relationship to Cp; thereby testing and ascertaining the relative priority of these hypotheses, proposed by Manly and Rickert (1940) and Blake (1985) respectively. To complete a comprehensive analysis of the La manuscript I have transcribed it into electronic format to permit accurate cross-referencing with a base text and other transcribed witnesses; an electronic copy of the transcription is provided with this thesis. A meticulous and exhaustive consultation of the La manuscript itself has also been completed, the detail of which is described within the chapters and appendices of this thesis. Chapter I discusses and reviews the history of Canterbury Tales editions and scholarly attitudes regarding the textual tradition. A thorough description of the La witness is presented in Chapter II. The provenance of La and a reassessment of Manly and Rickert's work in this area is discussed fully in Chapter III. Chapter IV considers the tale order, and major textual omissions and additions of La and Cp, and begins to explore the genesis of the La and Cp text. This is investigated further in Chapter VI by close study of the minor omissions, additions, dialect and spelling, and glosses of the two manuscripts. These chapters yield firm evidence of sufficient detail to test the hypotheses of Blake and Manly and Rickert. Chapter V discusses the inclusion of unique links in La. Chapter VII considers the decoration of La and the plausibility of it having been produced in a commercial scriptoriurn. The Conclusion forms Chapter VIII in which it is established that Blake's hypothesis may be dismissed, and that Manly and Rickert's hypothesis is inconclusive. I have proposed an equally viable conjecture supported by both textual and other evidence, that La and Cp share a common ancestor, the c archetype, but that La was produced by conSUlting an intermediate, and now unknown exemplar.
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Horobin, Simon. "A transcription and study of British Library MS additional 35286 of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales." Thesis, University of Sheffield, 1997. http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/6001/.
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Much scholarship devoted to the study of the text of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales has focused on the Hengwrt and Ellesmere manuscripts, attempting to reconcile their many differences in the content and presentation of the poem. In concentrating on these two manuscripts, and a small group of other witnesses dated to the first quarter of the fifteenth century, scholars have largely ignored over forty complete manuscripts copied throughout the remainder of the century. Study of the manuscripts has relied on features external to the text of the poem itself in order to chart the development of the tradition, such as the order of tales, while details of text, language and metre have remained relatively unconsidered. The subject of this study is a manuscript that has been neglected by scholars due to its date of copying, c. 1430-50, and certain idiosyncracies in the tale-order. Despite these factors this manuscript contains a text closely related to that of Hg, the earliest extant copy of the poem. In addition to preserving an accurate copy of an early exemplar, Ad3 also shows close links with El, particularly in its ordering of the tales and the inclusion of marginalia. This is therefore an important copy of the poem, highlighting the restrictions and limitations of current attitudes to the textual tradition, and with much to offer as an independent witness to an early exemplar, with unique access to materials used in the production of both Hg and El. This study draws on recent technological developments, such as the availability of electronic versions of Middle English texts and collation software, in order to provide a detailed and comprehensive analysis of Ad3. In addition to this an electronic version of the text is included to enable further research of this kind.
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Wheeler, Lyle Kip. ""Of pilgrims and parables" : the influence of the Vulgate parables on Chaucer's Canterbury tales /." view abstract or download file of text, 2001. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/uoregon/fullcit?p3024538.
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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2001.Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 242-261). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.
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Mathur, Indira. "Beyond monologism : a study of the system-event dialectics in Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales." Toulouse 2, 2010. http://www.theses.fr/2010TOU20071.
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La thèse porte sur un des ouvrages médiévaux les plus connus en anglais, notamment Les Contes de Cantorbéry de Geoffrey Chaucer (1340 – cc. 1400). L’étude vise à définir la démarche créative de Chaucer à travers les Contes. Nous nous appuyons pour cela sur la théorie bakhtinienne selon laquelle la création événementielle prend forme dans un double mouvement ; elle repose sur un système tout en s'écartant de ce même système. L'étude que nous proposons s'articule autour de trois axes d'analyse. Le point de départ se situe au niveau de la focalisation narrative. Notre démarche constitue à définir, à travers des commentaires détaillés de certains extraits des Contes, l'interaction et l'oscillation entre différentes perspectives. Dans un deuxième temps, nous explorons la technique mise en œuvre par Chaucer lors de la création de textes originaux à travers son adaptation de trois genres, notamment la confession, le sermon et le fabliau. Enfin, nous nous intéressons plus particulièrement aux implications des choix de Chaucer en tant que traducteur-créateur dans son adaptation de certains extraits du Roman de la Rose de Jean de Meun. La conclusion de l'étude se rapporte à la prouesse chaucerienne d'avoir pu créer un ouvrage original à une époque marquée par le ressassement perpétuel des mêmes thèmes et des mêmes approches et ce dans une langue d'un statut incertain que fut le Moyen AnglaisThis thesis is on the Canterbury Tales written by Geoffrey Chaucer (1340 – cc. 1400). My main aim is to describe Chaucerian creation in terms of the system-event dialectic as per Bakhtin. According to the Bakhtinian theory, an event takes shape from a system through adherence and departure from that very system. The thesis focuses on three constituents in the production of the Canterbury Tales, namely the interplay between different narrative perspectives, the adaptation of generic conventions and the translation of extracts from a French text. The study opens with a close reading of some extracts of the Tales with a view to circumscribing and defining the narrative perspective(s). The scope of the study then widens by the focus on Chaucer's technique of adaptation of three genres to create an evential text. The three genres in question are confession, sermon and the fabliau. Lastly, I dwell upon sociolinguistics considerations related to Chaucer's translation of some extracts of Jean de Meun's Roman de la Rose. I conclude upon Chaucer's feat in creating an original text within a period where literary themes and techniques limited. Most of all, he uses a linguistic medium which is far from being a firmly established one in literature, that is Middle English
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Walsh, Morrissey Jake. "The world "up so doun" : plague, society, and the discourse of order in the Canterbury tales." Thesis, McGill University, 2005. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=83845.
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Witnesses believed that the Black Death and subsequent fourteenth-century plagues threatened profound social change. However, Geoffrey Chaucer (c.1340-1400) does not appear to accord the plague a place of any importance in his works. This is especially surprising in the case of the Canterbury Tales , which presents a complex portrait of plague-era society. Chaucer's silence on the plague is reinforced by critical positions that deemphasize the effects of the plague and emphasize Chaucer's supposed lack of interest in his world. This thesis contends that the plague is in fact present in the Canterbury Tales in the guise of the changes that it threatened. By situating the Canterbury Tales in a network of literary and non-literary responses to the plague, I demonstrate that Chaucer participated in a discourse that attempted to restore order to a world that was seen to have been disordered---morally, socially, and physically---by the plague.
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Jauquet-Jessup, Marilee. "Chaucer: An Understanding of the Sexes." Xavier University / OhioLINK, 1999. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=xavier1352140691.
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Ramsey, David S. "Authority and Subversive Narrations : Rereading the Canterbury Tales (古典を読み直す)." 名古屋大学大学院国際言語文化研究科, 2005. http://hdl.handle.net/2237/8133.
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Burkhardt, Stephanie D. Woods William. "Chaucer's mounted menagerie an intertextual examination of horse and rider archetypes in the Canterbury tales /." Diss., A link to full text of this thesis in SOAR, 2007. http://soar.wichita.edu/dspace/handle/10057/1116.
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Thesis (M.A.)--Wichita State University, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Dept. of English."May 2007." Title from PDF title page (viewed on Nov. 4, 2007). Thesis adviser: William Woods. Includes bibliographic references (leaves 69-72).
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Martin, Chelsea R. "Individual Spirituality and The Canterbury Tales: An Analysis of the Philosophical Connection Between The Tale of Melibee and The Parson’s Tale as It Operates within the Narrative Framework." ScholarWorks@UNO, 2012. http://scholarworks.uno.edu/td/1465.
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An analysis of both the placement and the philosophical connections between The Tale of Melibee and The Parson’s Tale suggests that a highly individual spiritual philosophy is being presented within The Canterbury Tales. This philosophy is exemplified via an analysis of both the role of The Tale of Melibee within the work, and the manner in which it is historically developed. The highest form of individual spirituality is revealed within The Tale of Melibee, through the spiritual developments occurring within the character Melibeus and his wife Prudence. This development serves to unify the exemplified extremes of satire and spirituality presented throughout the work, as well as to illustrate the manner in which the individual human being develops his or her own individual spirituality through an active engagement with life, which in turn promotes a unity of the aforementioned extremes.
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Blandeau, Agnès. "The Canterbury Tales et Il Decameron visualisés par Pasolini : quand le récit prend corps en image." Paris 4, 2002. http://www.theses.fr/2002PA040110.
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Tournant décisif dans le paysage littéraire médiéval occidental, peu après Il Decameron, The Canterbury Tales consacrent la richesse d'une langue vernaculaire à travers l'expérimentation stylistique et rhétorique, tout en soulignant la narrativité mais aussi l'écriture du texte en train de se faire. Pier Paolo Pasolini puise dans le corps des oeuvres de Boccace et Chaucer l'esprit d'un moyen âge (fantasmé), dont il célèbre la vie. Il y voit également le théâtre privilégié d'une pratique de l'art jubilatoire du récit. L'adaptation ou plutôt vision pasolinienne des Tales, mis en regard avec Il Decameron dans une trilogie colorée, relève en vérité d'une visualisation personnelle et poétique qui, paradoxalement, enrichit la lecture des textes, malgré les écarts commis.
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Wauhkonen, Rhonda L. ""Reading from within": Nicholas of Lyra, the sensus iteralis, and the structural logic of "The Canterbury Tales"." Thesis, University of Ottawa (Canada), 1994. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/9552.
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Like certain of his more reactionary religious contemporaries (most notably, Nicholas of Lyra, O.F.M., and John Wyclif), Chaucer concerns himself with critically reflexive literature. Through his various narrative and exegetical efforts, he produces--in The Canterbury Tales especially--what amounts to "Christian midrashim" or a literary tarqum as he, like Nicholas and Wyclif before him, directly addresses matters of textual and referential authority, of relational significances, and of the text's apparently intended personal effects. Reflecting the logic and concerns of the central Text of the age and apparently formulating their shared concept of the literal, of its signification, and of its function from Hebraic rather than Latin referential categories, each of these writers after his fashion and field calls for a return to ethical and social praxis based upon a responsible interpretation of the Divine Word according to its inherent logic and meaning. Being concerned to re-establish the pertinence of auctorite for the individual and the age, they thus present "right reading" as an intellectual endeavour under moral imperative. Involving both author and reader in the text, they clarify the sensus literalis (the essential significance of a text) as being not only "what the words signify" (Augustine), but what the words were intended to signify by their Author--as this is supported by the body of received ecriture and as it is accessible to those who approach the text in spiritual and moral readiness, prepared to engage actively the material (and its Author) by activating it in their own immediate experience. My use of such terms as midrashim and tarqum from the Jewish tradition to describe Chaucer's unique contribution to Fourteenth century literature is quite intentional, for it foregrounds the seminal--and Semitic--source, semiotic, and structural logic that underlies the particular theory of the sensus literalis which Nicholas develops from a marriage of rabbinical and patristic sources, which Wyclif gives a distinctively English expression and application, and which Chaucer seems to adapt to poetic forms. My thesis, attempting to deal in a fuller sense with referential meaning generally and with the sensus literalis specifically, explores the ways in which Nicholas, Wyclif, and, after them, Chaucer approach the deeper significance of the literal. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)
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Walsh, Morrissey Jake. ""Termes of phisik": Reading between literary and medical discourses in Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and John Lydgate's Dietary." Thesis, McGill University, 2011. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=103533.
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This dissertation demonstrates that the poetry of Geoffrey Chaucer and John Lydgate joined nonliterary medical texts in transporting medical discourse into the English language and culture. In the later-fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the production of Middle English medical and literary texts increased dramatically. These categories overlapped at the site of medical verse. I show that authors of imaginative fiction also wrote what is in effect medical verse by employing medical discourse in stand-alone poems and in passages embedded in longer works. As Chaucer and Lydgate became central in an emergent national literary canon, their texts––and the medical content they contained––enjoyed an especially broad circulation. Thus Chaucer and Lydgate participated in the Englishing and popularization of medical discourse. In the General Prologue and linking narratives of the Canterbury Tales, Chaucer satirizes academic medicine by means of its own discourse––what he calls the "termes of phisik"––and in the context of a larger thematic exploration of healing and illness in post-Black Death England. In the Knight's tale, Chaucer includes a miniature verse treatise on lovesickness (amor hereos), which, despite its brevity and satiric quality, draws learnedly from contemporary medical theory, in effect constituting one of the best-known technical works on the subject in Middle English. Lydgate's Dietary, a verse regimen of physical, spiritual, and social health, was one of the most widely circulated Middle English poems. It has been overlooked and misunderstood by scholars, however, because they have neglected to consider the poem's complex relationship with its sources and analogues and often refer to a highly unrepresentative edition of the text. By locating Chaucer's and Lydgate's creative uses of medical discourse within their textual and historical contexts, I offer new readings of their poems and reconstruct their respective roles in English medical history.Cette thèse se propose de démontrer que la poésie de Geoffrey Chaucer et de John Lydgate s'allie à des textes médicaux non littéraires dans le processus de passage du discours médical dans la langue et la culture anglaises. Vers la fin du quatorzième et au quinzième siècle, la production de textes dans les domaines médical et littéraire en moyen anglais a augmenté de façon spectaculaire. Ces catégories de textes se sont toutefois chevauchées en regard avec la profession médicale. Dans ce travail, je montre que les auteurs de fiction imaginative ont écrit aussi de façon effective dans le domaine médical et ont employé le discours médical dans des poèmes séparés et d'autres passages ont été incorporés dans des œuvres plus longues. Comme Chaucer et Lydgate sont devenus incontournables dans le contexte littéraire national émergent de l'époque, leurs textes – et le contenu médical qu'ils contiennent – ont connu une diffusion particulièrement grande. Ainsi Chaucer et Lydgate ont contribué au progrès de langue anglaise ainsi qu'à la vulgarisation du discours médical. Dans le prologue général et les récits de liaison des Contes de Canterbury (Canterbury Tales), Chaucer fait la satire de la médecine universitaire par le moyen de son propre discours – ce qu'il appelle les « termes of phisik » – et d'une grande exploration thématique de la maladie et la guérison dans l'Angleterre de l'après-peste noire. Dans le conte du Chevalier, Chaucer inséra un court verset traitant du chagrin d'amour (amor hereos), lequel malgré sa brièveté et sa qualité satirique, use savamment de la théorie médicale contemporaine. Ce qui, en effet, fait de lui l'une des œuvres techniques, écrites en moyen anglais, les plus connues sur le sujet. La Diététique (Dietary) de Lydgate, un verset sur le régime de santé physique, spirituel, social, a été l'un des poèmes les plus largement diffusés en moyen anglais. Cependant, il a été négligé et pas très bien reçu par les chercheurs, parce qu'ils n'avaient pas considéré la relation complexe qu'entretient ce poème avec ses sources et ses analogues, et aussi parce qu'ils ont utilisé à une édition fort non-représentative du texte. En plaçant l'utilisation créative du discours médical de Chaucer et de Lydgate dans leur contexte textuel et historique, ce travail propose une nouvelle lecture de leurs poèmes et un meilleur rétablissement de leurs rôles respectifs dans l'histoire médicale anglaise.
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LaBurre, Jennifer. ""Wood Leoun" . . . "Crueel Tigre": Animal Imagery and Metaphor in "The Knight's Tale"." ScholarWorks@UNO, 2011. http://scholarworks.uno.edu/td/125.
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The people of the Middle Ages believed animals were disconnected from themselves in terms of ability to reason and ability to resist passions. Humans and animals were created by God, but he bestowed man with a soul and the ability to resist earthly delights. When men were described in terms of their bestial counterparts it was conventionally meant to highlight some derogatory aspect of that character. Chaucer makes use of the animal-image throughout The Canterbury Tales, especially in "The Knight's Tale," to stress a break in each character from humane reason or to emphasize a lean towards a bestial nature. The degree of this departure is showcased in the ferocity of the animal-image in question and the behavior and nature of the character, i.e. the animals of a more timid nature or neutral standing highlight a much less negative nature than the ferocious predators present in the battle scenes.
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Canter, Zachary A. "Tom Jones, Joseph Andrews, and The Canterbury Tales: Parallels in the Comic Genius of Henry Fielding and Geoffrey Chaucer." Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University, 2016. https://dc.etsu.edu/etd/3036.
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The parallels between the works of Geoffrey Chaucer and Henry Fielding are very striking. Both authors produced some of the greatest works in English literature, yet very little scholarly investigation has been done regarding these two in relationship with one another. In this work I explore the characters of Chaucer’s Parson and Parson Adams, assessing their strengths and weaknesses through pastoral guides by Gregory the Great and George Herbert, while drawing additional conclusions from John Dryden. I examine the episodic, theatrical nature of both authors’ works, along with the inclusion of fabliau throughout. Finally, I look at the shared motif of knight-errant in the works of both authors and the motion employed throughout the tales as travel narratives. By examining these authors’ works, I contend that Fielding masterfully employs many of Chaucer’s literary techniques in his own tales, crafting them to work specifically for the eighteenth-century novel and its audience.
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Wodzak, Victoria. "Reading dinosaur bones : marking the transition from orality to literacy in the Canterbury Tales, Moll Flanders, Clarissa, and Tristram Shandy /." free to MU campus, to others for purchase, 1996. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/mo/fullcit?p9823336.
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McCormack, Frances. "Chaucer and the culture of dissent the Lollard context and subtext of the Parson's tale /." Dublin : Four Courts Press, 2007. http://catalog.hathitrust.org/api/volumes/oclc/156890795.html.
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Driscoll, William. "By the Will of the King: Majestic and Political Rhetoric in Ricardian Poetry." Thesis, University of Oregon, 2017. http://hdl.handle.net/1794/22801.
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The stories we tell give meaning and coherence to our political situation; they reproduce, interrogate, and, at times, challenge the discourse of authority. Thus, when the political situation changes so do our narratives. In the thirteenth century, responding to a majestic rhetoric of vis et voluntas (force and will), the barons strengthened the community of the realm by turning it into a powerful collective identity that fostered political alliances with the gentry. By The Will of the King demonstrates how Ricardian poetry was shaped by and responded to the conflict between majestic and political rhetoric that crystallized in the politically turbulent years culminating in the Second Barons’ War (1258-1265). By placing Gower’s Confessio Amantis and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in dialogue with this political tradition, I demonstrate how narrative became a site of conflict between vertical, cosmic descriptions of power and horizontal realities of power, a conflict from which the contours of a civic habit of mind began to emerge.
Over the past twenty years, scholars have begun to investigate the evolution of this habit of mind in the late Middle Ages. By looking at the narrative practice of Gower and Chaucer through the lens of thirteenth-century political innovation, I extend and fill in this depiction of a nascent political imaginary. Each poet responds to the new political circumstances in their own way. Gower, placing the political community at the center of Book VII of the Confessio, rigorously reworks the mirror for princes genre into a schematic analysis of political power. For Chaucer, political rhetoric becomes visible at the moment that the traditional majestic rhetoric of kingship collapses. The Canterbury Tales, as such, restages the conflict of the thirteenth century in aesthetic terms—giving form to the crisis of authority. Ultimately, Ricardian poetry exposes and works through an anxiety of sovereignty; it registers the limits of a majestic paradigm of kingship; and reshaping narrative, aesthetic, and hermeneutic practice, it conjures a new political imaginary capable of speaking to and for a community which had emerged during the reign of Henry III.
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Cosgrove, Walker Reid. "Enacted medieval spirituality on the page the Divine comedy and the Canterbury tales elucidating the internal and external pilgrimage of Margery Kempe /." Online full text .pdf document, available to Fuller patrons only, 2004. http://www.tren.com.
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Nelson, Sharity. "Between "Ernest" and "Game": The Aesthetics of Knowing and Poetics of "Witte" in William Langland's Piers Plowman and Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales." Thesis, University of Oregon, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/1794/13420.
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A common assumption in theories of the aesthetic is that it is a concept and experience that belongs to modernity. However, as Umberto Eco has shown, the aesthetic was a topic of great consideration by medieval thinkers. As this project demonstrates in the study of the poetry of William Langland and Geoffrey Chaucer, the aesthetic was, in fact, a dynamic and complex concept in the Middle Ages that could affirm institutional ideologies even as it challenged them and suggested alternative perspectives for comprehending truth. This project focuses on the ways in which the poets' respective vernacular literary masterpieces, Piers Plowman and The Canterbury Tales, individually craft theories of the aesthetic and defend its role as a privileged discursive epistemology. I argue that, for Langland and Chaucer, the aesthetic is a discursive mode through which the reader comes to possess a complex knowledge that matches his or her nature, material and immaterial, sensitive and intellective; the reader arrives at this knowledge by engaging his or her wits in a translation of the poetics of Piers Plowman and The Canterbury Tales. For Langland, this translative exercise is evoked by the complex interplay of allegory and irony, and the result of the aesthetic experience is an embodied knowledge of God's truth that he refers to as "kind knowing." For Chaucer, the aesthetic is configured through the experience of irony, a figure that engages the process of translation as it confirms the complexity of truth as we can comprehend it. The aesthetic is also, for Chaucer, represented by the privileged mode of parody, which allows the reader to hear, as it were, what is missing and, in reading, supply the missing voice and create a dialogue--between text and reader and/or tale and tale--that in effect remasters whatever is monoaural by translating it into stereo. Ultimately, for both Langland and Chaucer, the aesthetic engenders instruction and pleasure, and both together are essential to our embodied comprehension of truth.10000-01-01
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Jenkins, Sara D. ""The wil of his wif" discourse, power, and gender in Chaucer's The Tale of Melibee /." [Tampa, Fla.] : University of South Florida, 2005. http://purl.fcla.edu/fcla/etd/SFE0001082.
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Flewellyn, Meghan. "Medieval Feminine Humanism and Geoffrey Chaucer's Presentation of the Anti-Cecilia." ScholarWorks@UNO, 2009. http://scholarworks.uno.edu/td/998.
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Perhaps due to its seemingly straightforward religious nature, the Second Nun's Cecelia Legend in The Canterbury Tales is often dismissed by scholars and readers alike. However, through analyzing Chaucer's earlier analogues, it becomes apparent that Chaucer has left out key pieces of the Life of Saint Cecelia. These omissions can be explained as attempts to illustrate the humanistic beliefs of both St. Augustine and Christine de Pizan. Further, the etymology of key words which appear in the "Second Nun's Prologue and Tale" help to reinforce the satire which Chaucer creates. Chaucer has deleted the humanism from the Saint Cecelia Legend in order to illustrate the potential for the corruption of female virtue.
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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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Youmans, Karen DeMent. "Chaucer and the Rhetorical Limits of Exemplary Literature." Thesis, University of North Texas, 1999. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc279341/.
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Though much has been made of Chaucer's saintly characters, relatively little has been made of Chaucer's approach to hagiography. While strictly speaking Chaucer produced only one true saint's life (the Second Nun's Tale), he was repeatedly intrigued and challenged by exemplary literature. The few studies of Chaucer's use of hagiography have tended to claim either his complete orthodoxy as hagiographer, or his outright parody of the genre. My study mediates the orthodoxy/parody split by viewing Chaucer as a serious, but self-conscious, hagiographer, one who experimented with the possibilities of exemplary narrative and explored the rhetorical tensions intrinsic to the genre, namely the tensions between transcendence and imminence, reverence and identification, and epideictic deliberative discourse.
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Tracy, Bauer A. "The Pardoner's Consolation: Reading The Pardoner's Fate Through Chaucer's Boethian Source." Ohio Dominican University / OhioLINK, 2021. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=odu1619274562731637.
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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.