Browsing by Subject "Chaucer"
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Item Chaucer's Jailer's Daughter(2015-05) Snell, Megan Angela; Scala, Elizabeth, 1966-; Bruster, DouglasWe know that Shakespeare read Chaucer, but we do not know exactly how he read Chaucer. Established models of source studies require solid "proof," but this paper proposes a more liquid conception of influence that permeates a work in unexpected ways. The Jailer's Daughter, the seemingly un-Chaucerian alteration to The Knight's Tale frame of the Shakespeare and Fletcher play, The Two Noble Kinsmen, acts as the case study of such permeation. Only a single line in the lengthy Knight's Tale offers a parallel figure for this character: the Knight narrates that Palamon escapes prison "By helpyng of a freend," and in the play the Jailer's Daughter frees Palamon from her father's prison. Because it does not supply dialogue, a name, or even a gender to the "freend," The Knight's Tale has long been presumed to offer Shakespeare and Fletcher little beyond this event to inspire the play's more substantive subplot. I argue that the Jailer's Daughter offers a surprising means of connection not only to The Knight's Tale, the obvious source text, but also to the other tales of the First Fragment of The Canterbury Tales, which "quite" the tale of courtly love that precedes them. In The Two Noble Kinsmen, she embodies what the Knight disallows in his narration of the tale, leaking madness and feminine desire into the play's foundation. This structure ultimately suggests how Shakespeare works characterologically, channeling the complexity of a source such as Chaucer fluidly through a unit of character.Item Embodied cognition, Latin pedagogy, and the rhetorical foundations of medieval vernacular poetry(2015-05) Garbacz, Robert Scott; Woods, Marjorie Curry, 1947-; Birkholz, Daniel, 1967-; Wojciehowski, Hannah C; Johnson, Michael A; Walker, JeffreyThis dissertation uses the insights of recent cognitive science to illuminate narrative and rhetorical strategies in the Eclogue of Theodolus, a Latin debate poem, and its French and English literary descendants. The Eclogue was wildly popular in classrooms throughout the Middle Ages and modeled for students ways to respond to stories with counter-stories, demonstrating rhetorical virtuosity by transforming images, words, and ideas. In doing so, it prepared the way for vernacular literary production. Chapters 1 and 2 focus on the ways the Eclogue’s narrative rhetoric, and particularly its imagery, was processedby medieval students using mental capacities recently revealed by modern cognitive linguistics and neuroscience. In the Eclogue, a character representing Christian truth triumphs over one representing pagan falsehood precisely through her ability to transform the cognitive and affective effects of the work’s visual and spatial rhetoric. Yet if the Eclogue emphasizes Christian superiority, the early French Roman d’Enéas deploys a similar specular rhetoric for a less respectable purpose. Lush descriptions of funeral monuments lure the reader away from what is otherwise the text’s central concern: legitimizing the French political order. These chapters show both the sophistication of medieval imagery and the discourses deployed to limit its power. Chapters 3 and 4 consider medieval theories of cognition. Chapter 3 focuses on the Owl and the Nightingale, a debate poem generally considered the first great work of Middle English literature. This poem undercuts the Eclogue’s lofty rhetoric by presenting myopic protagonists whose avian nature (in keeping with Neo-Aristotelian theory) is most clearly shown in their stubborn emphasis on their desires to live and kill. Similarly earthbound in its orientation is Chaucer’s House of Fame. This work, which begins with a survey of scholastic cognitive science and which offers a climactic ekphrasis in which the Eclogue takes a prominent place, offers both a deeply skeptical account of the ability of embodied humans to know the truth and a tour de force of medieval narrative rhetoric. Taken together, these discussions offer a survey of the power of medieval images on medieval brains and unearth a significant force in medieval intellectual culture.Item Finding Lollius : empathy, textual knowledge, and the ending of Troilus and Criseyde(2014-05) Escandell, Jason Paul; Scala, Elizabeth, 1966-; Wojciehowski, HannahThe ending of Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde has been a frequent source of dissatisfaction and confusion. After five full books centered on a doomed love between pagans, the final stanzas suddenly shift to an orthodox Christian rejection of worldly desire. Whether damning or praising the ending, critics generally recognize it as radically different from the lines preceding it. This report seeks to identify the root of that difference, and to explain its effect on the reading experience. The narrator of Troilus and Criseyde, a character in his own right, manipulates his putative source text--Lollius--to highlight the gaps left in his narrative. These gaps, in turn, constrict our perspective on the poem, preventing us from adopting either the Godlike Boethian viewpoint the Troilus appears to recommend or the melancholic attitude of the titular lovers. Instead, our point of identification is the narrator, who has read, as he persistently reminds us, a book that we cannot. Thus, even when the Troilus is read to the end, it feels incomplete. I ground this reading in both narratology and cognitive science, and illustrate it by examining two early printed "completions" of Chaucer's text: Wynkyn de Worde's colophon and Robert Henryson's Testament of Cresseid.Item The long line of the Middle English alliterative revival : rhythmically coherent, metrically strict, phonologically English(2012-05) Psonak, Kevin Damien; Cable, Thomas, 1942-; Henkel, Jacqueline M.; Hinrichs, Lars; Lesser, Wayne; King, Robert D.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.Item Speaking through the “open-ers” : how age feminizes Chaucer’s Reeve(2013-05) Waymack, Anna Fore; Birkholz, Daniel, 1967-The Reeve’s Prologue in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales represents one of the most prominent medieval narratives of old age. In his bitter tirade the Reeve emphasizes the topics of impotence, sexuality, power and voice through a series of metaphors involving horses, leeks, coals, and medlar fruit. Though the Prologue itself has been extensively discussed, little of the discussion has been in the context of age studies. Nor have scholars paid much attention to the medlar, called by its colloquial name “open-ers.” The Reeve chooses to describe himself and other older men through this unmistakably sexualized and repulsive term, raising paradoxical issues of rottenness and ripeness. He uses the medlar to resist fourteenth-century age culture and reconfigure his identity into a submissive, open one. Where impotence has removed agency and voice, this new identity enables a feminized voice, a claim to desire, and an ability to quyte the Miller for what the Reeve perceived as an ageist story meant to mock him. However, a Lacanian reading suggests that in grappling with his impotence, the Reeve has come to realize the futility of signifying and the difficulties of expressing desire. The Reeve’s Prologue thus exposes the breakdown of desire in the Reeve’s Tale and raises larger questions about the influence of older age on tale-telling, especially in a masculine register.Item “That country beyond the Humber”: the English North, regionalism, and the negotiation of nation in medieval English literature(2009-12) Taylor, William Joseph; Scala, Elizabeth, 1966-; Birkholz, Daniel, 1967-; Woods, Marjorie C.; Blockley, Mary E.; Heng, GeraldineMy dissertation examines the presence of the “North of England” in medieval texts, a presence that complicates the recent work of critics who focus upon an emergent nationalism in the Middle Ages. Far removed from the ideological center of the realm in London and derided as a backwards frontier, the North nevertheless maintains a distinctly generative intimacy within the larger realm as the seat of English history—the home of the monk Bede, the “Father of English History”—and as a frontline of defense against Scottish invasion. This often convoluted dynamic of intimacy, I assert, is played out in those literary conversations in which the South derides the North and vice versa—in, for example, the curt admonition of one shepherd that the sheep-stealer Mak in the Wakefield Master’s Second Shepherd’s Play stop speaking in a southern tongue: that he “take out his southern tooth and insert a turd.” The North functioned as a contested geography, a literary character, and a spectral presence in the negotiation of a national identity in both canonical and non-canonical texts including Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, William of Malmesbury’s Latin histories, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and the Robin Hood ballads of the late Middle Ages. We see this contest, further, in the medieval universities wherein students segregated by their “nacion,” northern or southern, engaged in bloody clashes that, while local, nevertheless resonated at the national level. I argue that the outlying North actually operates as a necessary, if not sufficient, condition for the processes of imagining nation; that regionalism is both contained within and constitutive of its apparent opposite, nationalism. My longue durée historicist approach to texts concerned with the North—either through narrative setting, character, author or textual provenance—ultimately uncovers the emerging dialectic of region and nation within the medieval North-South divide and reveals how England’s nationalist impulse found its greatest expression when it was threatened from within by the uncanny figure of the North.