5 results
13 - The Nun’s Priest’s Tale
- Edited by Frank Grady, University of Missouri, St Louis
-
- Book:
- The Cambridge Companion to The Canterbury Tales
- Published online:
- 21 August 2020
- Print publication:
- 10 September 2020, pp 191-204
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Chaucer’s Nun’s Priest’s Tale, a version of the well-known tale of the cock and the fox, has been read as a Menippean parody of a spectrum of authors: various forms and kinds of knowledge, from proverbs to dream theory to poetics to anti-Pelagian theology, proffer a myriad of ways in which to read the world without cohering in the slightest with one another, or solving the immediate, practical problem faced by the cock and his hens: the threat of death at the hands of a creature that they have not yet directly encountered. This chapter suggests how modern readers of the tale might negotiate its formidable critical legacy and find their way to a fresh, unique encounter with a tale in which direct experience promises a means of liberation from the plethora of discourses in which narration is always in danger of becoming mired. In pursuing experience rather than authority, the chapter argues, we are following a trail that begins within the tale itself.
Chapter 7 - Authority
- from Part II - Books, Discourse and Traditions
- Edited by Ian Johnson, University of St Andrews, Scotland
-
- Book:
- Geoffrey Chaucer in Context
- Published online:
- 24 June 2019
- Print publication:
- 11 July 2019, pp 58-64
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Auctoritas, granted by medieval interpretative communities to a host of Christian and classical writers, set in motion complex negotiations between the voices of the living and the dead. Alan of Lille had observed that authority has a ‘wax nose’, capable of being twisted in opposite directions. And in Chaucer’s lifetime, the exercise of authority was radically challenged in both ecclesiastical and sociopolitical spheres. Likewise, the emergence of writing in several European vernaculars provided new arenas in which to scrutinise and challenge both the workings of auctoritas and the ideologies that it could be made to serve. Accordingly, Chaucer dismantled and exposed both the inner contradictions of auctoritas and the price – the elisions, distortions and arbitrary privileging of some interpretations over others – at which it was achieved and preserved. That he was granted a measure of posthumous auctoritas is one of the paradoxes of English literary history.
The Theatre of the Mind in Late-Medieval England
- Edited by Meg Twycross, Pamela M. King, Sarah Carpenter, Greg Walker
-
- Book:
- Medieval English Theatre 38
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 20 April 2017
- Print publication:
- 18 February 2017, pp 115-128
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
What George Myerson has called ‘the argumentative imagination’ took a variety of memorable forms in late-medieval England. Myerson was particularly concerned with post-medieval examples of religious dialogue, but many intellectually ambitious texts from late-medieval Europe as a whole, whether in Latin or the vernacular, in their original language or in translation, used dialogue as a means of structuring, articulating, and stresstesting complex materials. Combining the internally-focused rigour of logic with the externally-focused pragmatism of rhetoric, dialogue functioned as an emissary between the intellect and the imagination across a wide range of literary and dramatic contexts. Anne Godard has discussed how, in some late-medieval religious writings, dialogue functions as a way of mediating between the atemporal sphere of revelation and the inevitably temporal context in which such privileged and esoteric experiences become subject to discursive transmission. In Caterina of Siena's mystical dialogues and in the philosophical dialogues of Cusanus or Ficino, she argues, dialogue constructs a relationship between the immediacy of the vision received and the mediated nature of the intelligible discourse into which it is translated. The discursive texture of Julian of Norwich's Short and Long Texts would corroborate Godard's nuanced situating of dialogue as intrinsic to the process whereby mystical experience is turned into discursive literature. Likewise, as its alternative title, Liber Quaestionum, implies, Liber V of Bridget of Sweden's Revelationes (Liber Caelestis) mobilises discursive resources reminiscent of those used in scholastic debate. The Mirror of Simple Souls, with its multiple interlocutors, could also be added to this list. And although a very different kind of vision, Piers Plowman is a foundational text in the medieval history of the argumentative imagination, the colophon of the B-text in Trinity College, Cambridge, MS B. 15. 17 — Explicit hic dialogus Petri Plowman — pointedly prioritising the poem's formidably aporetic qualities over any of its other generic features.
Visionary literature is, of course, only one kind of genre in which a body of knowledge or experience is subjected to the dramatic, reflective, and critical properties of dialogue. Myerson's elaboration of the concept of the argumentative imagination presents it as the engine of ‘whole, poetic worlds which would not exist except through the representation of argument’. Argument, in this context, is conceived as ‘a living relationship, a relationship between differing voices’.
10 - Prophecy, Complaint and Pastoral Care in the Fifteenth Century Thomas Gascoigne’s Liber Veritatum
- Edited by Cate Gunn, Catherine Innes Parker
-
- Book:
- Texts and Traditions of Medieval Pastoral Care
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 07 March 2023
- Print publication:
- 19 November 2009, pp 149-162
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
In his commentary on St Matthew’s gospel, Thomas Aquinas identifies two purposes of prophecy: confirmation of the faith and the correction of morals. In his view, the second task ‘is never complete, nor will it ever be’. There is some continuity between this statement and Benedict XVI’s recent assertion that a certain ‘prophetic-charismatic history traverses the whole time of the Church. It is always there especially at the most critical times of transition.’ Such statements indicate the necessity, and indeed the inevitability, of prophetic discourse as an essential element in the evolution and continuous reform of the Church. But ‘prophecy’ has always been a multivalent term requiring nuanced taxonomy, and different levels of institutional privilege have been granted to its various modes over time. Kathryn Kerby-Fulton has recently argued for the existence of a fundamental antagonism between ‘the revelatory and the scholastic’ during the high and late Middle Ages, seeing them as ‘rivals for the prize of theological illumination … with contempt for each other’s methods’.
Revelation was only one of the prophetic modes, however, and scholastic theologians retained an important role for a different kind of prophecy among their professional duties. Most pertinent for the concerns of this essay is what such theologians understood as prophetia comminationis, ‘the prophecy of denunciation’, a prominent mode of discourse among the Old Testament prophets, which typically took the form of the denunciation of lax mores and calls to repentance. Prophetia comminationis was one of the forms identified by Aquinas in his treatise on prophecy and charismata in the Summa Theologiae. In this he was following the taxonomy established in the Glossa Ordinaria, which had stated that denunciation was ‘significative of the divine wrath’ [‘quae fit ob signum divinae animadversionis’]. The exegesis of scriptural examples of prophetia comminationis became a fundamental resource for the rhetoric of late medieval ecclesiastical reform, even among theologians who contested the validity of other prophetic modes. As sanctioned by scripture, and by scriptural exegesis, the prophecy of denunciation became a standard rhetorical feature in the works of both avowedly orthodox writers – such as Thomas Gascoigne, the subject of this essay – and those whose ideas were hereticated. As I will show in this essay, examination of the prevalence and significance of the prophecy of denunciation focuses attention on the extent to which, under the umbrella of reformist thinking, orthodox and heterodox alike shared the same auctoritates, rhetorical strategies and many substantive concerns.
3 - Jean Gerson, Poet
- from PART I - LEARNED POETRY/POETRY AND LEARNING
-
- By Mishtooni Bose, Christ Church, Oxford
- Edited by Rebecca Dixon, Lecturer in French Studies, University of Manchester, Finn E. Sinclair, Research Associate, University of Cambridge; Fellow in French, Girton College, Cambridge
-
- Book:
- Poetry, Knowledge and Community in Late Medieval France
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 25 October 2017
- Print publication:
- 20 November 2008, pp 56-68
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Pourquoi cette metamorphose? Pourquoi le theologien se transforme-t-il en poete?… Au XVe siecle, il est beaucoup trop tard pour inventer la poesie chretienne: mais la poesie mystique d'expression latine?
Et quis in hoc evo scire poemata vult?
Que meliora potest exclusus ab omnibus, exsul,
Officiis? Sed nec carmina flere vetant.
[And who in our time wants to learn poems? What better things has the man excluded, exiled, from every office, to do? But songs do not prevent one from weeping.]
In 1955, Max Lieberman observed that the poems of the prolific Jean Gerson had received far less attention from scholars than had his many other writings. This remains the case. Gerson is still best known to Anglophone literary scholars as the avowedly anti-heretical critic of the Roman de la Rose. But it has recently become possible to consider whether his poetry might fit with a number of new critical and historical narratives that seek to see Gerson whole and to consider him as an example of a new kind of public intellectual that emerged in late-medieval Europe and typically functioned as an intermediary between different social cadres, lay and clerical, scholastic and extramural. One way of pursuing a similar line of enquiry is to consider how Gerson's poetic output interacted with, and sometimes may have substituted for, the kinds of diplomatic, pastoral and political action that had made him a prominent figure in French public life and further abroad. For example, the years 1417 and 1418 were years of personal and professional crisis for Gerson, as the Council of Constance drew to an end without his having achieved either of his personal aims (the establishment of a feast day for St Joseph and the posthumous censure of Jean Petit for heresy). He was forced into temporary exile, seeking shelter from supporters of the Burgundy faction of the French aristocracy, who might have been angered by his stance towards Petit. But the period of professional frustration at Constance inaugurated a seminal moment in the development of his poetry. He wrote two major literary works during and after Constance: the Biblical epic Josephina and the De consolatione theologiae, in which he exploits and appropriates the stylistic resourcefulness of Boethius, alternating prose dialogues with poetry in a variety of metres. Far from remaining in Boethius's shadow, he confidently uses the auctor as a point of departure.