Where the Middle Ages Begin
Although I think that the notion of modern art as organic must be qualified and questioned, there is a certain force and validity to Jordan’s distinction between medieval and modern art. Modern art expects the parts to be somewhat subordinate to the whole. The dominant stress of New Criticism was on the organic nature of art.
The article focuses on the representation of deviant sexual behavior in 14th-century English poetry and other chronicles. The portrayal of King of England Richard II as a rebellious youth, which is interpreted as perverse and lacking manliness, and the propaganda needed to offset this perception are discussed. Historical information is given about the political culture and power of the church. The murder of Edward II after being accused of sodomy by the Bishop of Hereford is mentioned.
One frustration of engaging in any branch of European medieval studies as an academic pursuit is that few claim expertise about the ancient or Roman worlds, but seemingly everyone on an internet discussion forum believes him or herself knowledgeable about the medieval period, usually based on patently false beliefs.
The Pardoner of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales is usually perceived as terrible and morally bankrupt. As a result, he is often categorized as an evil and one-dimensional character.
This thesis proposes a correlation between the twenty-four Canterbury Tales and an external ordered system, namely the twelve signs of the zodiac, from which one might infer Chaucer’s intended ordering of the Tales.
Over the centuries many authors have attempted to re‐write or adapt the work of Geoffrey Chaucer, including John Dryden, Alexander Pope, and William Wordsworth. This trend has continued into the 21st century, as Chaucer has been reaffirmed as an English literary icon
Anyone interested in Chaucer knows the description of the Wife of Bath in the General Prologue by heart, ‘her gap teeth, her wimple, her hat, her five husbands, her heavy coverchiefs [. . .] her deafness, [. . .] [and] her remedies of love’
What do We Really Know about Medieval Women? Carolina Galdiz (Trinity College) 115 Vernon, Paper 26, (2013) Abstract At the onset of this project, I had hoped to do a comparative analysis of women in different social classes. My vision was that sources on the subject would endeavor to discuss women as a group and […]
This thesis assesses the extent to which fourteenth-century Middle English poets were interested in, and influenced by, traditions of thinking about logic and mathematics.
This thesis proposes to look at the equation between time and text in the later medieval period. Time-telling and tale-telling have a particularly dynamic relationship in the considers time-telling and temporal referencein an era (c.1230 – 1500) that time-measurement multiple cultural experiencesa greatvariety of types of and
attitudes to time.
Caught in the (One-)Act: Staging Sex in Late Medieval French Farce Sharon D. King Paper given at the 14th Triennial Colloquium of the Société Internationale pour l’étude du Théâtre Médiéval Poznań, Poland, 22nd – 27th July (2013) Abstract Among the myriad subjects for comical delectation of audiences of late medieval France,the rules and roles of […]
The subject of this work is the concept and figure of the Wild Woman. The primary focus will be on various forms this figure assumes in medieval English literature: Grendel’s mother—the second monster Beowulf faces—and Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, along with other figures.
Epic and Christianity are not incompatible, but they are uneasy bedfellows.
The purpose of this essay will be to explore the significance of competition and feedback in The Canterbury Tales, by applying historical evidence of literary competition in the fourteenth century to a discussion of the frame narrative, especially the prologue and epilogue to Chaucer’s Tale of Sir Thopas.
He uses food and drink as the means to express people’s characters, look, but also mood and situation.
This thesis investigates the function and representation of female characters through Arthurian tropes in three fourteenth-century English Arthurian texts: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, ‘The Wife of Bath’s Tale,’ and Sir Launfal.
Everybody knows what we should think about the Prioress’ love for animals. She steals from the poor by feeding her ‘smale houndes’ roast meat and good bread. And she’s breaking the rules just by keeping pets.
But whenever authors of work on chivalry and war during the Middle Ages have tried to determine the exact historical influence and result of chivalric ideals, they have run into difficulties. That is why there are such widely varying hypotheses concerning the ‘Golden Age’ of chivalry.
In this thesis, I intend to illustrate how Chaucer uses his knowledge of garden traditions, both biblical and practical, to discuss the concept of the Garden of Eden and the Fall of humanity.
Chaucer’s inimitable Wife of Bath stands out as one of the most analyzed literary characters of all time, in part because of her existence outside of any defined medieval cultural classification, and in part as an archetype of a rising social tradition.
Geoffrey Chaucer and John Gower, friends and colleagues, both chose to retell the same story at roughly the same time in their story collections, The Canterbury Tales and the Confessio Amantis.
The majority of medieval scholars, including Roger Sherman Loomis, argue that the popularity of the Arthurian legend in England was therefore on the wane in the latter half of the fourteenth century; as a result, the major writers of the period, such as John Gower and Geoffrey Chaucer, refrained from penning anything beyond the occasional reference to King Arthur and his court.
The linguistic composition of the Exeter Book Riddles supports this, and in fact, the genre became a refuge for contemporary colloquial speech which was seen as coarse and lower class within the ideologies of Christianity and Germanic heroism.
Fashion of Middle England and its Image in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales Petra Štěpánková Bachelor Thesis, Masaryk University – Brno, Faculty of Education, Department of English Language and Literature, Brno (2012) Abstract This thesis deals with the main features of fashion in medieval England and focuses particularly on the second half of the fourteenth century. It […]
Chaucer uses both common and courtly love in the Canterbury Tales. His pilgrims represent nearly every level of the social scale and range anywhere from a knight to a miller to a parson to a pardoner. Thererfore, their status will determine what kind of tale they will tell.
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