DISTORTIONS OF THE CHAUCERIAN TRADITION IN THE ASSEMBLY OF LADIES

History of European Ideas, 1981

This chapter considers how illuminators responded to the challenges presented by the emerging concept of a contemporary author of English poetry at a time when no such profession existed, focusing on all extant representations of Chaucer in manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales. These challenges also formed a central preoccupation of the texts that illuminators illustrated; yet limners’ responses to these challenges do not replicate in picture the anxieties that are voiced in the texts they illustrate. Rather, manuscript producers, informed by the dynamics of their profession, parallel in a uniquely visual mode the anxieties then in literary circulation. To those who authored images, who is the author of a text? And how is an authorial identity negotiated via pictorial allusions that substituted for the rejected convention of the writing auctor in manuscripts of Middle Enghlish verse? In responding to these questions, I show that the limners of the earliest major works in Middle English verse produced authors through a concatenation of voices and pictures, a repertoire deriving from pictorial media extending far beyond the parameters of their own texts. When tasked with pinning a face to a text, illuminators had no choice but to consult their own notions about a text’s ontology and the author’s ontological status with respect to it. This quandary was particularly pressing when it came to illuminating the metafictional and, following A. C. Spearing’s coinage, the autographic works that populated England’s literary scene in the later Middle Ages. The arguments that illuminators frequently offered arose not only from the texts in front of them but also from the cache of images that made up the intellectual storehouse of their profession. From these images, I argue that the tradition of authorial portraiture for Middle English poets is an indeterminate one that discloses, more than anything else, the hesitations and reluctance of its makers. The consequence of this argument, to be explored in later chapters, is that whatever authority is allowed the rhetorical “I” of the text is a contingent authority, drawn not from the virtuosity of language, truth of content, or prestige of its author but rather from copy-specific features of the manuscript itself. Without a sense of the “true” origins of a text, literature was, in this period, a flexible cultural production open to opportunistic manipulation and instrumentalization that illustrative programs could—and did—provide.

Miscelanea a Journal of English and American Studies, 2004

In the middle of the fifteenth century Osbern Bokenham, an Augustinian friar of Stoke-Clare and author of works such as the Legendys of Hooly Women and the Mappula Anglia writes: "I do not wish to be called auctour, but the pore compilatour". He sees his work, therefore, as that of a compiler of others' writings and claims no originality or the title of author. He does not give his own name (except in an acrostic), but one might ask how many authors' names we in fact know before the last quarter of the fourteenth century? "Anon" was a very busy writer in the Middle Ages. Apart from Cynewulf, who we know nothing about and may never have existed, we have no known Old English poets, and there are also very few names in the early Middle English period other than Layamon. Who wrote, for example, Cursor Mundi, Sir Orfeo, King Horn, Havelok the Dane, Floris and Blanchflour or Arthur and Merlin, and in the Chaucerian period who were the geniuses responsible for Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, Patience, Purity, St Erkenwald and the medieval mystery plays? 1 Then in Chaucer's time and in the fifteenth century we know of Gower, Langland, Hoccleve, Lydgate, Clanvowe and many more. Suddenly poets are no longer ashamed to be seen as authors and one wonders about the significance of this change. Is anonymity simply a modesty topos, or are authors afraid of political or ecclesiastical criticism? This is indeed the case of the Wycliffite and Lollard writers and poets of political and religious satire, but would the author of romances have

Poetry in Byzantine Literature and Society (1081-1204), 2024

ELH, 1996

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Artuklu insan ve toplum bilim dergisi, 2019

Geoffrey Chaucer, regarded to be the greatest author of the medieval times, marked his mastery and gift in not only his narrative composition but also lyric poetry. Songs and letters, as significant mediums of lyric art, have an important role in his work Troilus and Criseyde, which was composed in the 1380s. In this work, Chaucer exhibits his lyric prowess in a superb and functional way by using the songs and letters which signalize themselves in the forms of mainly love, bliss, sorrow or complaint. In examining the lyric units in this work, new historicism is also used as a literary approach that connects the ancient and medieval times. Also some comparison with the works of Boccaccio, Robert Henryson and Shakespeare is made in terms of their using lyric units. The aim of this paper is to analyse Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde in terms of his use of songs and letters, functioning in several senses such as means of self-expression of characterstheir bliss or afflictions, fundamental communication tools of characters, mediums that assure secrecy in terms of court literature and instruments representing both human love and eternal love.

Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2020

Studies in the Age of Chaucer is the yearbook of the New Chaucer Society. It publishes articles on the writing of Chaucer and his contemporaries, their antecedents and successors, and their intellectual and social contexts. More generally, articles explore the culture and writing of later medieval Britain (1200-1500). SAC also includes an annotated bibliography and reviews of Chau cer-related publications.