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Winthrop Wetherbee's study of Dante's relationship to the classical Latin poets--Vergil, Ovid, Lucan, Statius--is a genuine tour-de-force.
In this sensitive reading of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, Winthrop Wetherbee redefines the nature of Chaucer’s poetic vision. Using as a starting point Chaucer’s profound admiration for the achievement of Dante and the classical poets, Wetherbee sees the Troilus as much more than a courtly treatment of an event in ancient history—it is, he asserts, a major statement about the poetic tradition from which it emerges. Wetherbee demonstrates the evolution of the poet-narrator of the Troilus, who begins as a poet of romance, bound by the characters’ limited worldview, but who in the end becomes a poet capable of realizing the tragic and ultimately the spiritual implications of his story.
As students and scholars of Boccaccio, Chaucer, and Dante know, late medieval writers were influenced greatly by the work of peers that crossed historical, national, cultural, linguistic boundaries. Through a Classical Eye contains first-rate essays that demonstrate a range of strategies for undertaking transcultural and transhistorical studies of the late medieval period, and examines medieval literature and culture where English, Italian, and Latin materials overlap. Written in honour of the groundbreaking contributions that Winthrop Wetherbee made to this growing area of study, the volume's contributors advance his legacy and add to the burgeoning interest in setting medieval literary studies into wide intellectual and historical horizons. Divided into three illuminating sections on Medieval Latin authorship, Italy and the world, and England and beyond, and including a personal reminiscence of Wetherbee by the noted novelist Robert Morgan, Through a Classical Eye is an outstanding collection that provides key insights into medieval literature and culture.
Western literary, philosophical, and religious traditions from Plato and Paul to Augustine and Avicenna have utilized, exploited, or been subjected to allegorical interpretation. Naturally developing a composite picture of interpretive allegory from such a large landscape faces numerous difficulties. As the editor puts it, “to imagine a ‘definitive’ account of the theory and practice of allegorical interpretation in the West would require something of an allegorical vision in its own right.” With that caveat in mind, however, the international team of contributors—from a variety of disciplines—offers a “historical and conceptual framework” for understanding interpretive allegory in the West, from antiquity through the early and late medieval and renaissance periods, and from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries. This publication has also been published in hardback, please click here for details.
Chartres as an intellectual and cultural force in the Renaissance of the twelfth century has engaged the attention of critics and scholars from R. L. Poole through Gilson, Curtius, and Huizinga to, most recently, Peter Dronke. Its importance as a poetic tradition is now reviewed by Winthrop Wetherbee, first as it developed at Chartres, then as it influenced later poetry, French as well as Latin. Mr. Wetherbee analyzes, and supports with his own translations, the poetry notably of Bernardus Silvestrus and Alain dc Lille: he defines the intellectual milieu of the Chartrian poets and their Platonic conception of nature, man, and poetry. Myth, philosophy, and the literary statement that gives th...
Mark Miller's innovative study argues that Chaucer's Canterbury Tales represent an extended mediation on agency, autonomy and practical reason. This philosophical aspect of Chaucer's interests can help us understand what is both sophisticated and disturbing about his explorations of love, sex and gender. Partly through fresh readings of the Consolation of Philosophy and the Romance of the Rose, Miller charts Chaucer's position in relation to the association in the Christian West between problems of autonomy and problems of sexuality and reconstructs how medieval philosophers and literary writers approached psychological phenomena often thought of as distinctively modern. The literary experiments of the Canterbury Tales represent a distinctive philosophical achievement that remains vital to our own attempts to understand agency, desire and their histories.
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Piers Plowman and the Books of Nature explores the relationship of divine creativity, poetry, and ethics in William Langland's fourteenth-century dream vision. These concerns converge in the poem's rich vocabulary of kynde, the familiar Middle English word for nature, broadly construed. But in a remarkable coinage, Langland also uses kynde to name nature's creator, who appears as a character in Piers Plowman. The stakes of this representation could not be greater: by depicting God as Kynde, that is, under the guise of creation itself, Langland explores the capacity of nature and of language to bear the plenitude of the divine. In doing so, he advances a daring claim for the spiritual value o...
Offers a significant new reading of the late medieval poet Thomas Hoccleve, illustrating Hoccleve's role in recasting Chaucer as a figure of intellectual and moral authority, and situating Hoccleve - and the nascent English literary tradition - firmly in the context of heresy and religious reform.