Research Catalog

Pagans, Tartars, Moslems, and Jews in Chaucer's Canterbury tales

Title: Pagans, Tartars, Moslems, and Jews in Chaucer's Canterbury tales / Brenda Deen Schildgen.
Author: Schildgen, Brenda Deen, 1942-
Publication: Gainesville : University Press of Florida, ©2001.

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Status	Format	Access	Call Number	Item Location
Request for On-site Use Request Scan Not available - Please for assistance.	Book/Text	Use in library	PR1875.R45 S38 2001	Off-site

Details

Description

183 pages; 24 cm

Summary

Brenda Deen Schildgen takes a new path in Chaucer studies by examining the Canterbury Tales set outside a Christian-dominated world--tales that pit Christian teleological ethics and history against the imagined beliefs and practices of Moslems, Jews, pagans, and Chaucer's contemporaries, the Tartars. Schildgen contends that these tales--for example, the Knight's, Squire's, and Wife of Bath's--deliberate on the grand rifts between the Christian or pagan past and Chaucer's present and between other cultural worlds and the Latin Christian world. They offer philosophical views about what constitutes "wisdom" and "lawe" while exploring alternative moral attitudes to the Christian mainstream of Chaucer's time. She argues that their presence in the Canterbury Tales testifies to Chaucer's literary secularism and reveals his expansive narrative interest in the intellectual and cultural worlds outside Christianity. Making impressive use of medieval intellectual history, Schildgen shows that Chaucer framed his tales with the diverse philosophies, religions, and ethics that coexisted with Christian ideology in the late Middle Ages, a framework that emerges as political and not metaphysical, putting these beliefs deliberatively in the context of literary discourse, where their validity can be accepted or dismissed and, most important, debated. --

Subject

Bibliography (note)

Includes bibliographical references (p. [129]-177) and index.

Contents

Pagan philosophical perspectives: a knight and a squire -- Fortune, the stars, and the pagan gods in the Knight's and the squire's tales -- "Hethenesse" in the Canterbury tales: Christian versus Islamic and pagan space in the "man of law's tale" -- Rash promises, oaths, and pre-Christian Britain in the wife of Bath's and the franklin's tales -- A prioress and a monk: providential history of trial -- The "second nun's tale": Christians as a persecuted minority.

ISBN

0813021073
9780813021072

LCCN

2001034074

OCLC

ocm46952224
46952224
SCSB-14584065

Owning Institutions

Princeton University Library