Chaucer and the Subject of History

by Patterson, Lee

• ISBN13: 9780299128340
• ISBN10: 0299128342
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1991-10-01
• Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Pr

Summary

InChaucer and the Subject of History, a leading medievalist provides us with a compelling vision of the shape and direction of Geoffrey Chaucer's entire career. Chaucer's interest in individuality was strikingly modern. At the same time he was profoundly aware of the pressures on individuality exerted by the past and by societyby history. This tension between the subject and history is Patterson's topic. He begins by showing how Chaucer's understanding of history as a subject for poetrya world to be represented and a cultural force affecting human actionbegan to take shape in his poems on classical themes, especially inTroilus and Criseyde. Patterson's extended analysis of this profound yet deeply conflicted exploration of the relationship between "history" and "the subject" provides the basis for understanding Chaucer's shift to his contemporary world in the Canterbury Tales. There, in the shrewdest and most wide-ranging analysis of late medieval society we possess, Chaucer investigated not just the idea of history but the historical world intimately related to his own political and literary career. Patterson's chapters on individual tales clarify and confirm his provocative arguments. He shows, for example, how the Knight's Tale represents the contemporary crisis of governance in terms of a crisis in chivalric identity itself; how the Miller's Tale reflects the social pressures and rhetoric of peasant movements generally and the Rising of 1381 in particular; and how the tales of the Merchant and Shipman register the paradoxical placement of a bourgeois class lacking class identity. And Patterson's brilliant readings of the Wife of Bath's Tale"the triumph of the subject"and the Pardoner's Tale "the subject of confession"reveal how Chaucer reworked traditional materials to accomplish stunning innovations that make visible unmistakably social meanings. Chaucer and the Subject of Historyis a landmark book, one that will shape the way that Chaucer is read for years to come.

Author Biography

Lee Patterson is professor of English at Duke University.  He is the author of Negotiating the Past:  The Historical Understanding of Medieval Literature published by the University of Wisconsin Press.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix	(2)
A Note on Citations	xi	(2)
List of Abbreviations	xiii
INTRODUCTION	3	(44)
CHAPTER 1 "Thirled with the Poynt of Remembraunce": The Theban Writing of Anelida and Arcite	47	(37)
CHAPTER 2 Troilus and Criseyde and the Subject of History	84	(81)
CHAPTER 3 The Knight's Tale and the Crisis of Chivalric Identity	165	(66)
CHAPTER 4 From Tragedy to Comedy through the Legend of Good Women	231	(13)
CHAPTER 5 The Miller's Tale and the Politics of Laughter	244	(36)
CHAPTER 6 The Wife of Bath and the Triumph of the Subject	280	(42)
CHAPTER 7 Chaucerian Commerce: Bourgeois Ideology and Poetic Exchange in the Merchant's and Shipman's Tales	322	(45)
CHAPTER 8 The Subject of Confession: The Pardoner and the Rhetoric of Penance	367	(55)
AFTERWORD	422	(7)
Bibliography	429	(48)
Index	477