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Slider
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- By David Raybin
- Edited by Stephanie L. Batkie, Matthew W. Irvin, Lynn Shutters
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- Book:
- A New Companion to Critical Thinking on Chaucer
- Published by:
- Amsterdam University Press
- Published online:
- 21 October 2021
- Print publication:
- 30 June 2021, pp 75-88
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- Chapter
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Summary
Knight's Tale
Clerk's Tale
Franklin's Tale
Canon's Yeoman's Prologue and Tale
Boece
God only knows
God makes his plan
The information's unavailable
To the mortal man
We work our jobs
Collect our pay
Believe we’re gliding down the highway
When in fact we’re slip slidin’ away.
(Paul Simon, “Slip Slidin’ Away”)A BIT OVER 350 lines into the Knight's Tale, Arcite has been released from captivity “in angwissh and in wo” (1.1030) and sent home to Thebes. Disconsolate that he can no longer see his beloved Emelye, Arcite bemoans his confinement in what he calls a “prisoun worse than biforn,” envies the “victorie” enjoyed by Palamon, who may continue to live “[f]ul blisfully” in a cell Arcite likens to “paradys,” and turns philosophical (1.1224, 1235–37). It is, he says, a sad aspect of human nature that in the search for happiness people habitually go astray:
“We faren as he that dronke is as a mous.
A dronke man woot wel he hath an hous,
But he noot which the righte wey is thider,
And to a dronke man the wey is slider.
And certes, in the world so faren we;
We seken faste after felicitee,
But we goon wrong ful often, trewely.”
(1.1261–67)For a drunken man, the path to his house is slider. The word slider is unusual in Chaucer, its only other instance coming in the Legend of Good Women, where it describes the slipperiness of a ship's deck when an enemy has strewn it with peas to render it hazardous in the confusion of battle. Variants (slyde, slit, slydyng/e) appear more frequently—in the Clerk's Tale, Franklin's Tale, and Canon's Yeoman's Tale in the Canterbury Tales, and also in Boece, the Book of the Duchess, the Parliament of Fowls, and Troilus and Criseyde— and often, as with Arcite's complaint, in meaningful and potentially hazardous situations. In this chapter, I explore Chaucer's use of the word slideras it is reflected in the haphazard movement of events and reflective philosophical attitude that undergird the Knight's Tale, and then, more briefly, in how the variants point to similar perspectives in the Clerk’s, Franklin’s, and Canon's Yeoman's Tales.
Talking about Chaucer with School Teachers
- from 16 - Postscript: How to Talk about Chaucer with Your Friends and Colleagues
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- By David Raybin
- Edited by Frank Grady, University of Missouri, St Louis
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- Book:
- The Cambridge Companion to The Canterbury Tales
- Published online:
- 21 August 2020
- Print publication:
- 10 September 2020, pp 244-249
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Summary
What should we do about the fact that reading Chaucer is hard? The “immersion theory” of learning Middle English, rooted in nineteenth-century philological approaches, is no longer really functional or well-suited to attract our wider and more diverse contemporary audience of students; we might return, productively if paradoxically, to an earlier appreciation of textual difficulty (and reward), which we actually share with our Modernist colleagues. In this we can make translations our allies rather than our antagonists. Moreover, the stereotypes about the Middle Ages that we have traditionally railed against, from “dark-ages” dismissals to pre-Raphaelite romanticizations, may no longer be the ones our twenty-first-century students carry with them these days.
6 - Petrus Alfonsi, the Disciplina clericalis and Le Romaunz Peres Aunfour of MS Digby 86
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- By David Raybin, Eastern Illinois University
- Edited by Susanna Fein
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- Book:
- Interpreting MS Digby 86
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 24 October 2019
- Print publication:
- 19 July 2019, pp 87-112
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Summary
LE Romaunz Peres Aunfour coment il aprist et chaustia sun cher fiz belement is by far the longest item in Oxford, BodL, MS Digby 86. Filling 23½ doublecolumned folios (art. 27; fols. 74va–97vb), its French verse couplets occupy about twice as much space as any of the volume's three other substantial items: a medical treatise in French prose (13 folios: The Letter of Hippocrates, art. 7; fols. 8v–15v, 17r–21r), a treatise on falconry in French prose (13½ folios: Le Medicinal des oiseaus, art. 19; fols. 49r–62r) and a saint's life in French verse (11½ folios: Wace's Miracles de seint Nicholas, art. 54; fols. 150ra–161ra). The volume's remaining items are mostly quite short, although a few occupy from five to eight folios. The decision to include this lengthy text in the manuscript reflects the considerable interest the writings of Petrus Alfonsi held for a late medieval Anglo-French audience. Its placement may also reflect the compiler's particular interest in linking the diverse texts included in the manuscript, which range from religious, scientific and instructive texts, to secular material that includes comic tales, narratives of adventure and risqué verse.
It is not surprising that the compiler of a miscellaneous manuscript would have been pleased to include some version of Petrus Alfonsi's Disciplina clericalis in his book. Derived from Arabic, Hebrew and other Eastern sources, the early twelfthcentury Disciplina clericalis is the first framed story collection known to have been composed in Western Europe. As an assemblage of maxims, proverbs, moralisations and tales, it was both tremendously influential and widely circulated: at least seventy-six complete and partial copies of the Latin text survive, alongside two French verse translations (surviving in fourteen manuscripts), portions in French prose (surviving in seven manuscripts dated thirteenth to fifteenth centuries) and versions in other languages. At least twenty-five Latin copies survive from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and eight French copies (including Digby) survive from the last third of the thirteenth century.
Judging from the contents of Digby 86, it seems possible that the more widely disseminated Latin Disciplina clericalis would not have suited the compiler's linguistic preferences, and that he actively sought a French verse version.
15 - Teaching Teachers: Chaucer, Ethics, and Romance
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- By David Raybin
- Edited by Helen Phillips
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- Book:
- Chaucer and Religion
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 01 March 2023
- Print publication:
- 16 September 2010, pp 189-195
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Summary
For twenty years, I have been directing a small annual conference for school teachers. Each year in October, forty to eighty teachers from across my state of Illinois spend a day talking about a canonical book. Some of the teachers arrive the night before for an evening lecture, film, gallery show, or concert related to the world of Chaucer, Dickinson, Dante, Austen, or whoever our chosen author may be. In the morning we listen to a guest speaker discuss the author or book and then divide up into small groups for workshop sessions in which we discuss the topic from more directed perspectives. We repeat the procedure after lunch with a second speaker and additional workshops. These meetings are exciting: we make a point of inviting distinguished scholars who have a genuine interest in working with teachers, and the workshops that follow the lectures invariably provoke the kind of stimulating discussion one expects from highly motivated, self-selecting teachers. The participants, many of whom return year after year, say they appreciate the conference because of its emphasis on reading and on talking about books and ideas, with pedagogy a secondary consideration.
The principal limitation in these meetings is that the format of five or six hourlong blocks directed to a range of interests precludes concentrating very long on any one issue. With the support of my state Humanities Council, I have also been able to direct a longer conference that is more focused, more intense, and, happily, more leisurely: weekend seminars in which twelve to fifteen teachers and librarians gather in a lodge at a state park to eat, drink, and spend ten seminar hours and some free time pondering and arguing about my preferred topic: ‘Chaucer Today: Romance and Ethics’. The point of the seminar is to enjoy Chaucer, of course, but also to think about how his poetry and ideas matter. Romance and ethics are at the heart of the seminar because Chaucer frames an extraordinarily large part of his discussion of ethical behavior in terms of spouses, lovers, wooers, and rapists. It is in bedrooms and gardens and woods, in private conversation and – surprisingly often – before an audience, that Chaucer's characters make the ethical decisions that define them and, if we see character as a spiritual quality, determine their fates.