Political Poetics and the Aristotelian Turn

If emotion is expressed through the persuasive form of the enthymeme, what are the fields in which we can find this activated? Chapter 6 turns to poetry itself, poetry written in the wake of De regimine principum and arising from the sphere of political thought. It focuses on three texts that can be read in the light of De regimine principum: Dante’s Convivio, with emphasis on tractate IV and its canzone, part IV of Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale, and Hoccleve’s Prologue to his Regiment of Princes. Two of these, Convivio and Regiment of Princes, engage directly and explicitly with Giles of Rome’s work. Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale carries the accumulated influence of De regimine without directly citing it; Chaucer’s intertext is Dante’s Convivio. While these texts express some of the greater themes of De regimine, their poetic arguments can be read as enthymematic, using a brevity of argument that is emotionally effective. In this way, these poetic texts reflect—via the mediation of Giles’ De regimine—the impact of Aristotle’s rhetoric of emotion.

Chaucer's Solar Pageant: an Astrological Reading of the Canterbury Tales

<p>This thesis proposes a correlation between the twenty-four Canterbury Tales and an external ordered system, namely the twelve signs of the zodiac, from which one might infer Chaucer's intended ordering of the Tales. While it is generally acknowledged that the Tales contain much astrological material, the radical suggestion here is that Chaucer wrote them as a means of fulfilling his intention, expressed in A Treatise on the Astrolabe, to write a fifth part of that Treatise, in which be would explain to his ten-year old son, Lewys, the principles of astrology. The zodiac comprises twelve signs expressed as six binary oppositions throughout nature. In creating the Canterbury Tales, the thesis claims, Chaucer employed in each Tale two of those binary oppositions, a quadratic structure, to express the interplay of tensions between its main characters. The zodiacal signs symbolise parts of the human body which serve as metaphors of human characteristics according to an astrological medical melothesia that was commonplace in medieval times. The melothesia thus acts as a code, enabling Chaucer to covertly communicate sophisticated astrological knowledge whilst presenting it simplistically to political and royal court contemporaries who would have formed the bulk of his readership. Chaucer makes two rounds of the zodiac, starting with the Knight's Tale aligned with Aries (the head) replete with pagan astrological practices, completing the sequence with the Parson's Tale, aligned with Pisces (the feet), in which the pilgrims are exhorted to save their souls by repentance. The consistency with which the Tales in sequence give an emphasis to characteristics believed in the Middle Ages to be representative of the zodiacal sequence of signs is claimed to provide substantive evidence in support of one particular ordering of the Tales.</p>

Chaucer's Solar Pageant: an Astrological Reading of the Canterbury Tales

<p>This thesis proposes a correlation between the twenty-four Canterbury Tales and an external ordered system, namely the twelve signs of the zodiac, from which one might infer Chaucer's intended ordering of the Tales. While it is generally acknowledged that the Tales contain much astrological material, the radical suggestion here is that Chaucer wrote them as a means of fulfilling his intention, expressed in A Treatise on the Astrolabe, to write a fifth part of that Treatise, in which be would explain to his ten-year old son, Lewys, the principles of astrology. The zodiac comprises twelve signs expressed as six binary oppositions throughout nature. In creating the Canterbury Tales, the thesis claims, Chaucer employed in each Tale two of those binary oppositions, a quadratic structure, to express the interplay of tensions between its main characters. The zodiacal signs symbolise parts of the human body which serve as metaphors of human characteristics according to an astrological medical melothesia that was commonplace in medieval times. The melothesia thus acts as a code, enabling Chaucer to covertly communicate sophisticated astrological knowledge whilst presenting it simplistically to political and royal court contemporaries who would have formed the bulk of his readership. Chaucer makes two rounds of the zodiac, starting with the Knight's Tale aligned with Aries (the head) replete with pagan astrological practices, completing the sequence with the Parson's Tale, aligned with Pisces (the feet), in which the pilgrims are exhorted to save their souls by repentance. The consistency with which the Tales in sequence give an emphasis to characteristics believed in the Middle Ages to be representative of the zodiacal sequence of signs is claimed to provide substantive evidence in support of one particular ordering of the Tales.</p>

Boccaccio’s Early Romances

Ginsberg adapts Walter Benjamin’s idea of mode of meaning to read Boccaccio’s early romances, the Filostrato, the Teseida, and, to a lesser extent, the Filocolo, as intra-lingual translations; the prefaces to each work, which are personal and rhetorical, simultaneously follow and disarticulate the universalizing and allegorical impetus of the tales they frame. The mode of meaning in the Filostrato is the ‘the orality of writing’—the ways, that is, in which writing tries to voice itself throughout the poem. In Chaucer’s reworking, the Troilus, recitation as such, and prayer in particular, translate Filostrato’s self-absorption into ethical concern for others. In the Teseida, textuality, writing that addresses itself to readers and to other texts, translates the ways in which writing in the Filostrato tries to speak. Here Boccaccio equated epic and romance with the disposition of the heroes; Chaucer reinvented the merger in ‘The Knight’s Tale’, when he created the character of the Knight.

Historiography

This chapter addresses Chaucer’s chief model for the writing of universal history: the early fourteenth-century Anglo-Norman chronicle of Nicholas Trevet. The first section sketches out the overall nature of Trevet’s world history, indicating its scope and showing what view it presents of English national identity, especially in terms of genealogical descent and territorial claims. It then turns to the Constance narrative that provided a model for the Man of Law’s Tale, illustrating how Trevet’s version highlights the role of language in the establishment of national identity, and in the mediating of fundamental changes in that national identity. Selected other passages in Trevet’s work also illustrate the role of language in articulating the boundaries that separate nations and, sometimes, bring them together. The chapter closes by identifying what it is that Trevet’s historical vision offers readers of Chaucer’s histories, such as Troilus or the Knight’s Tale: namely, a capacious temporal scope that makes room for a plural vision of multiple historical contexts—biblical, apostolic, Trojan, Roman, Theban, British, Saxon, and English.

Anachronism as a Form of Metalepsis in Ancient Greek Literature

This chapter discusses anachronism as a form of metalepsis and different ways of understanding anachronism in the ancient and modern worlds. The chapter begins by highlighting potential complexities in applying Genette’s model of metalepsis to ancient literature, drawing out the differences between the case of a character about to murder a reader in Cortázar’s ‘Continuity of Parks’ (discussed by Genette) and that of a character, Helen, blinding and then healing an author in Stesichorus’ Palinode. It then turns to anachronism, a phenomenon which renders synchronous things that, from a historical/chronological perspective, do not belong to a shared temporal plane, and can thus be understood as metaleptic when the time periods involved are ‘the world in which one tells’ (the present) and ‘the world of which one tells’ (often, in the ancient world, the remote heroic past). The chapter moves from a modern instance which highlights anachronism’s pointedly transgressive potential (the use of 1970s music in Brian Helgeland’s 1370s-set movie, A Knight’s Tale) to the dominant ancient discourse about anachronism, according to which most anachronism is inadvertent and the critic’s job is to correct it. But the chapter argues that despite this, ancient sources such as Plato’s Symposium do recognize a more artful use of anachronism and potential modes of audience response to it, and concludes by asking what a pointedly erudite astronomical anachronism in a poem of Theocritus tells us about the audience envisaged by its author.

Writing Readers in the Thebaid, Teseida, and Knight’s Tale

Literary experiments in Trecento Italy share with the Canterbury Tales the notion that we might read texts in order to recover the thought behind them. But what does it mean for a reader to seek out a mental property in inanimate matter? Statius’ Thebaid offers one way for medieval authors to work through this question, for it depicts such a reader in Antigone, who perceives her brothers’ minds animating the flames of their funeral pyre. This chapter follows the figure of the lady at the pyre from the Thebaid to the Teseida and the Knight’s Tale. It argues that such reading practices emerge as self-effacing, prefiguring the literary critical notion of “the reader.” And it suggests that Chaucer connects such practices of self-effacing reading with both civilization and political control.