Browsing by Subject "Geoffrey Chaucer"
Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
Results Per Page
Sort Options
Item Chaucer's poetry and the new Boethianism(2010-08) Hunter, Brooke Marie; Scala, Elizabeth, 1966-; Woods, Marjorie Curry, 1947-; Birkholz, Daniel; Cable, Thomas; Ingham, Patricia C.My dissertation reexamines Chaucer’s debts to the Consolation by reconciling Boethius’s Neoplatonic distaste for the material world with Chaucer’s poetic celebrations of the variety and sensuality of human life. I revise the understanding of Chaucer’s poetry by recontextualizing it within a new Boethianism that stems from Chaucer’s interaction with the scholastic commentary on the Consolation by Nicholas Trevet. Although critics have long known that Chaucer’s Boece extensively borrows from, glosses, and cross references with Trevet’s commentary, very little attention has been given to what effect this had on Chaucer’s Boethian poetry. My dissertation argues that through Trevet’s immensely popular commentary, Chaucer received a predominantly Aristotelian-Thomist reading of the Consolation, one that reinvents Boethius’s Neoplatonic rejection of the sensual world as an apologetically materialist philosophy. The Aristotelian-Thomist influence of Trevet’s commentary is most visible in Chaucer’s treatment of the human interactions with the temporal world: in the functions of sense perception, the working of memory, and the desire to foresee the unknown future.Item Essays on Chaucer, Boccaccio, and Shakespeare(2016-04) Faden, Allie; Grant, Rebecca; Greenwood, Cynthia; Hill, Darcy; Plamer, JohnThe following video contains the session “Essays on Chaucer, Boccaccio, and Shakespeare” from the 2016 Second International Conference on Medieval and Renaissance Thought at Sam Houston State University. The papers presented in this session are “The Audience Sets the Tone: Voice in Parliament of Fowles and The Squire’s Tale” by Allie Faden, “Feminism and The Decameron: Boccaccio’s Exploration of Gender Equality” by Rebecca Grant, and “Exploring the Bawdy Court Ethos in Measure for Measure’s Design: Putting the Church Court’s Newly Stringent Laws Governing Sex and Betrothal on Trial” by Cynthia Greenwood.Item Misreading English meter : 1400-1514(2012-12) Myklebust, Nicholas; Cable, Thomas, 1942-; Blockley, Mary E; Heinzelman, Kurt O; Scala, Elizabeth D; King, Robert DThis dissertation challenges the standard view that fifteenth-century poets wrote irregular meters in artless imitation of Chaucer. On the contrary, I argue that Chaucer’s followers deliberately misread his meter in order to challenge his authority as a laureate. Rather than reproduce that meter, they reformed it, creating three distinct meters that vied for dominance in the first decades of the fifteenth century. In my analysis of 40,655 decasyllables written by poets other than Chaucer, I show that the fifteenth century was not the metrical wasteland so often depicted by editors and critics but an age of radical experimentation, nuance, and prosodic cunning. In Chapter One I present evidence against the two standard explanations for a fifteenth-century metrical collapse: cultural depression and linguistic instability. Chapter Two outlines an alternative framework to the statistical and linguistic methods that have come to dominate metrical studies. In their place I propose an interdisciplinary approach that combines the two techniques with cognitive science, using a reader-oriented, brain-based model of metrical competence to reframe irregular rhythms as problems that readers solve. Chapter Three applies this framework to Chaucer’s meter to show that the poets who inherited his long line exploited its soft structure in order to build competing meters; in that chapter I also argue that Chaucer did not write in iambic pentameter, as is generally assumed, but in a “footless” decasyllabic line modeled on the Italian endecasillibo. Chapter Four explores metrical reception; by probing scribal responses to Chaucer’s meter we can gain insight into how fifteenth-century readers heard it. Chapters Five through Seven investigate three specific acts of reception by poets: those of John Walton, Thomas Hoccleve, and John Lydgate. I conclude the dissertation by tracing the influence of Hoccleve and Lydgate on the later fifteenth-century poets George Ashby, Osbern Bokenham, and John Metham, and by identifying the eclipse of fifteenth-century meter with the Tudor poets Stephen Hawes and Alexander Barclay, who replaced a misreading of Chaucer’s meter with a misreading of Lydgate’s, inadvertently returning sixteenth-century poets to an alternating decasyllable reminiscent of Chaucer’s own meter.