Author: Gillian Adler Publisher: University of Wales Press ISBN: 1786838362 Category : Time Languages : en Pages : 241
Book Description
A study of time in Chaucer's major works. Geoffrey Chaucer wrote at a turning point in the history of timekeeping, but many of his poems demonstrate a greater interest in the moral dimension of time than in the mechanics of the medieval clock. Chaucer and the Ethics of Time examines Chaucer's sensitivity to the insecurity of human experience amid the temporal circumstances of change and time-passage, as well as strategies for ethicising historical vision in several of his major works. While wasting time was occasionally viewed as a sin in the late Middle Ages, Chaucer resists conventional moral dichotomies and explores a complex and challenging relationship between the interior sense of time and the external pressures of linearism and cyclicality. Chaucer's diverse philosophical ideas about time unfold through the reciprocity between form and discourse, thus encouraging a new look at not only the characters' ruminations on time in the tradition of St Augustine and Boethius, but also manifold narrative sequences and structures, including anachronism.
Author: Alcuin Blamires Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0199248672 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 276
Book Description
Alcuin Blamires explains how Chaucer shapes human problems in terms of the uneasy mix of moral traditions at the time. He looks at the main ethical and gender issues that dominate Chaucer's work
Author: John Bugbee Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess ISBN: 0268104484 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 614
Book Description
God’s Patients approaches some of Chaucer’s most challenging poems with two philosophical questions in mind: How does action relate to passion, to being-acted-on? And what does it mean to submit one’s will to a law? Responding to critics (Jill Mann, Mark Miller) who have pointed out the subtlety of Chaucer’s approach to such fundamentals of ethics, John Bugbee seeks the source of the subtlety and argues that much of it is ready to hand in a tradition of religious (and what we would today call “mystical”) writing that shaped the poet’s thought. Bugbee considers the Clerk’s, Man of Law’s, Knight’s, Franklin’s, Physician’s, and Second Nun’s Tales in juxtaposition with an excellent informant on a major stream of medieval religious culture, Bernard of Clairvaux, whose works lay out ethical ideas closely matching those detectable beneath the surface of the poems. While some of the positions that emerge—most spectacularly the notion that the highest states of human being are ones in which activity and passivity cannot be disentangled—are anathema to much modern ethical thought, God’s Patients provides evidence that they were relatively common in the Middle Ages. The book offers striking new readings of Chaucer’s poems; it proposes a nuanced hermeneutical approach that should prove fruitful in reading a number of other high- and late-medieval works; and, by showing how assumptions about its two fundamental questions have shifted since Chaucer’s time, it provides a powerful new way of thinking about the transition between the Middle Ages and modernity.
Author: Clíodhna Carney Publisher: ISBN: 9781846823367 Category : Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
This book reminds us of the reasons to read, and re-read, Chaucer. The essays cast new light on the poetry and, in their careful scholarship and sensitivity to the past, show us paradoxically how Chaucer is being re-conceived in the 21st century. Contents: Cliodhna Carney (NUIG) and Frances McCormack (NUIG), introduction; John scattergood (TCd), Goodfellas, sir John Clanvowe and Chaucer's Friar's tale; Brendan O'Connell (TCD), Chaucer's counterfeit exempla; Kristin Lynn Cole (Penn State U), Chaucer's metrical landscape; Cliodhna Carney, Petrarch, the clerk and the wife; Megan Murton (U Oxford), Chaucer's ethical poetic in the Canterbury Tales; Frances McCormack, The dangerous beauty of Chaucer's prioress; John Thompson (QUB), London's Chaucers; Helen Phillips (Cardiff U), Chaucer's roi solei; Charlotte Steenbrugge (Cambridge), Time and authority in Chaucer's Parliament of foules; Niamh Pattwell (UCD), Patterns of disruption in the Prioress' tale; Malte Urban (QUB), Chaucer in the 21st
Author: Gillian Adler Publisher: Reaktion Books ISBN: 1789146798 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 248
Book Description
An insightful account of how medieval people experienced time. Alle Thyng Hath Tyme recreates medieval people’s experience of time as continuous, discontinuous, linear, and cyclical—from creation through judgment and into eternity. Medieval people measured time by natural phenomena such as sunrise and sunset, the motion of the stars, or the progress of the seasons, even as the late-medieval invention of the mechanical clock made time-reckoning more precise. Negotiating these mixed and competing systems, Gillian Adler and Paul Strohm show how medieval people gained a nuanced and expansive sense of time that rewards attention today.
Author: Peter Ackroyd Publisher: Penguin ISBN: 1101155639 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 351
Book Description
A fresh, modern prose retelling captures the vigorous and bawdy spirit of Chaucer’s classic Renowned critic, historian, and biographer Peter Ackroyd takes on what is arguably the greatest poem in the English language and presents the work in a prose vernacular that makes it accessible to modern readers while preserving the spirit of the original. A mirror for medieval society, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales concerns a motley group of pilgrims who meet in a London inn on their way to Canterbury and agree to take part in a storytelling competition. Ranging from comedy to tragedy, pious sermon to ribald farce, heroic adventure to passionate romance, the tales serve not only as a summation of the sensibility of the Middle Ages but as a representation of the drama of the human condition. Ackroyd’s contemporary prose emphasizes the humanity of these characters—as well as explicitly rendering the naughty good humor of the writer whose comedy influenced Fielding and Dickens—yet still masterfully evokes the euphonies and harmonies of Chaucer’s verse. This retelling is sure to delight modern readers and bring a new appreciation to those already familiar with the classic tales.
Author: Gillian Adler
Author: Alcuin Blamires
Author: John Allan Mitchell
Author: Frank Grady
Author: John Bugbee
Author: Clíodhna Carney
Author: Vincent McNabb
Author: Diane Watt
Author: Gillian Adler
Author: Peter Ackroyd