Browsing by Subject "Troilus and Criseyde"
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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 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.