Chaucer and Italian Culture

Description

Chaucerian scholarship has long been intrigued by the nature and consequences of Chaucer’s exposure to Italian culture during his professional visits to Italy in the 1370s. In this volume, leading scholars take a new and more holistic view of Chaucer’s engagement with Italian cultural practice, moving beyond the traditional ‘sources and analogues’ approach to reveal the varied strands of Italian literature, art, politics and intellectual life that permeate Chaucer’s work. Each chapter examines from different angles links between Chaucerian texts and Italian intellectual models, including poetics, chorography, visual art, classicism, diplomacy and prophecy. Echoes of Petrarch, Dante and Boccaccio reverberate throughout the book, across a rich and diverse landscape of Italian cultural legacies. Together, the chapters cover a wide range of theory and reference, while sharing a united understanding of the rich impact of Italian culture on Chaucer’s narrative art.

Contributors
Introduction: Chaucer Imagines Italy - Helen Fulton
1. Chaucerian Diplomacy - William Rossiter
2. The Haunting of Geoffrey Chaucer: Dante, Boccaccio, and the Ghostly Poetics of the Trecento - James Robinson
3. Chorography and Topography: Italian Models and Chaucerian Strategies - Helen Fulton
4. Vision and Touch in Dante and Chaucer - Robert S. Sturges
5. The Aesthetics of ‘Wawes Grene’: Planets, Painting, and Politics in Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale - Andrew James Johnston
6. The Prophetic Eagle in Italy, England, and Wales: Dante, Chaucer, and Insular Political Poetry - Victoria Flood
7. ‘Trophee’ and Triumph in the Monk’s Tale - Leah Schwebel
8. From Imitation to Invention: Chaucer’s Journey from House of Fame to the Nun’s Priest’s Tale - Teresa A. Kennedy
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Literary Criticism
• Medieval

Informations

• Publié par: University of Wales Press
• Date de parution: 15 janvier 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781786836809
• Langue: English

Extrait

NEW CENTURY CHAUCER
Chaucer and Italian Culture
NEW CENTURY CHAUCER
Series Editors
Professor Helen Fulton, University of Bristol
Professor Ruth Evans, Saint Louis University
Editorial Board
Professor Ardis Butterfield, Yale University
Dr Orietta Da Rold, University of Cambridge
Dr David Matthews, University of Manchester
The works of Geoffrey Chaucer are the most-studied literary texts of the Middle Ages, appearing on school and university syllabuses throughout the world. From The Canterbury Tales through the dream visions and philosophical works to Troilus and Criseyde , the translations and short poems, Chaucer’s writing illuminates the fourteenth century and its intellectual traditions. Taken together with the work of his contemporaries and successors in the fifteenth century, the Chaucerian corpus arguably still defines the shape of late medieval literature.
For twentieth-century scholars and students, the study of Chaucer and the late Middle Ages largely comprised attention to linguistic history, historicism, close reading, biographical empiricism and traditional editorial practice. While all these approaches retain some validity, the new generations of twenty-first-century students and scholars are conversant with the digital humanities and with emerging critical approaches – the ‘affective turn’, new materialisms, the history of the book, sexuality studies, global literatures, and the ‘cognitive turn’. Importantly, today’s readers have been trained in new methodologies of knowledge retrieval and exchange. In the age of instant information combined with multiple sites of authority, the meaning of the texts of Chaucer and his age has to be constantly renegotiated.
The series New Century Chaucer is a direct response to new ways of reading and analysing medieval texts in the twenty-first century. Purpose-built editions and translations of individual texts, accompanied by stimulating studies introducing the latest research ideas, are directed towards contemporary scholars and students whose training and research interests have been shaped by new media and a broad-based curriculum. Our aim is to publish editions, with translations, of Chaucerian and related texts alongside focused studies which bring new theories and approaches into view, including comparative studies, manuscript production, Chaucer’s post-medieval reception, Chaucer’s contemporaries and successors, and the historical context of late medieval literary production. Where relevant, online support includes images and bibliographies that can be used for teaching and further research.
The further we move into the digital world, the more important the study of medieval literature becomes as an anchor to previous ways of thinking that paved the way for modernity and are still relevant to post-modernity. As the works of Chaucer, his contemporaries and his immediate successors travel into the twenty-first century, New Century Chaucer will provide, we hope, a pathway towards new interpretations and a spur to new readers.
NEW CENTURY CHAUCER
Chaucer and Italian Culture
Edited by
HELEN FULTON
© The Contributors, 2021
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Applications for the copyright owner’s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the University of Wales Press, University Registry, King Edward VII Avenue, Cardiff CF10 3NS.
www.uwp.co.uk
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978-1-78683-678-6
eISBN 978-1-78683-680-9
The right of The Contributors to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77, 78 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
Cover design: Olwen Fowler Cover images: Shutterstock
CONTENTS
The Contributors
Introduction: Chaucer Imagines Italy
Helen Fulton
1 Chaucerian Diplomacy
William T. Rossiter
2 The Haunting of Geoffrey Chaucer: Dante, Boccaccio and the Ghostly Poetics of the Trecento
James Robinson
3 Chorography and Topography: Italian Models and Chaucerian Strategies
Helen Fulton
4 Vision and Touch in Dante and Chaucer
Robert S. Sturges
5 The Aesthetics of ‘Wawes Grene’: Planets, Painting and Politics in Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale
Andrew James Johnston
6 The Prophetic Eagle in Italy, England and Wales: Dante, Chaucer and Insular Political Prophecy
Victoria Flood
7 ‘Trophee’ and Triumph in the Monk’s Tale
Leah Schwebel
8 From Imitation to Invention: Chaucer’s Journey from The House of Fame to the Nun’s Priest’s Tale
Teresa A. Kennedy
Notes
Bibliography
THE CONTRIBUTORS
Victoria Flood is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Birmingham. Her monograph, Prophecy, Politics and Place in Medieval England , a comparative study of the relationship between political prophetic production in England, Wales and Scotland, appeared in 2016. She previously held an Alexander von Humboldt postdoctoral fellowship at the Department of Celtic Studies, Philipps-Universität Marburg (2014–15).
Helen Fulton holds the Chair of Medieval Literature at the University of Bristol. Her main research area is the comparative study of medieval Welsh and English literatures, including political poetry, prophecy and Arthurian literature. She is the co-editor of Anglo-Italian Cultural Relations in the Later Middle Ages (2018) and of The Cambridge History of Welsh Literature (2019).
Andrew James Johnston is Chair of Medieval and Renaissance English Literature at the Freie Universität Berlin. His latest English-language monograph is Performing the Middle Ages from Beowulf to Othello (2008). His co-edited collections include The Medieval Motion Picture (2014), The Art of Vision: Ekphrasis in Medieval Literature and Culture (2015) and Love, History and Emotion in Chaucer and Shakespeare (2016). His most recent article is ‘ Beowulf as Anti-Virgilian World Literature: Archaeology, Ekphrasis, and Epic’, in the festschrift for Roberta Frank, The Shapes of Early English Poetry (2019).
Teresa A. Kennedy is professor of English at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia. Her main research interests include fourteenth-century English, Italian and French literature and linguistics. She is currently working on a monograph, Boccaccio and the Making of the Modern Reader , and recent publications include a co-edited special issue of MLN , ‘Tra Amici: Essays in Honor of Giuseppe Mazzotta’ (2012), and the article ‘Boccaccio’s Greek Philology’ in the festschrift for Winthrop Wetherbee, Through a Classical Eye (2009). She contributed ‘The Tale of Madonna Oretta’ to volume VI of the Lectura Boccaccii series in 2020.
James Robinson is the author of Joyce’s Dante: Exile, Memory, and Community (2016) and is currently working on a Leverhulme Trust funded monograph, Ted Hughes and Medieval Literature: ‘Deliberate Affiliation’ .
William T. Rossiter is Senior Lecturer in Medieval and Early Modern Literature at the University of East Anglia. His publications include the monographs Chaucer and Petrarch (2010) and Wyatt Abroad: Tudor Diplomacy and the Translation of Power (2014), and the co-edited collections Literature and Ethics: From the Green Knight to the Dark Knight (2010) and Authority and Diplomacy from Dante to Shakespeare (2013). He has also published a number of studies on Chaucer’s reception of the tre corone (Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio). He is currently working on a study of Pietro Aretino and the intersection of international diplomacy and print culture in the early sixteenth century.
Leah Schwebel is Associate Professor of English at Texas State University. Her research focuses on the reception of classical poetry in the works of Chaucer, Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio. She has published in The Chaucer Review , Medium Aevum , Mediaevalia , Dante Studies and Studies in the Age of Chaucer , and has co-edited a special issue of The Chaucer Review on the Legend of Good Women (2017). She is currently working on a monograph, tentatively titled Tropes of Engagement: Chaucer’s Italian Poetics .
Robert S. Sturges is Professor of English at Arizona State University. His books include Medieval Interpretation: Models of Reading in Literary Narrative, 1100–1500 (1991), Chaucer’s Pardoner and Gender Theory: Bodies of Discourse (2000), Dialogue and Deviance: Male-Male Desire in the Dialogue Genre (Plato to Aelred, Plato to Sade, Plato to the Postmodern) (2005), The Circulation of Power in Medieval Biblical Drama: Theaters of Authority (2015) and a facing-page edition and translation of Aucassin and Nicolette (2015). He has also edited Law and Sovereignty in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (2011), and has published numerous essays on medieval literature.
INTRODUCTION: CHAUCER IMAGINES ITALY
Helen Fulton
T his collection of essays is the result of many conversations and meetings among the contributors over a number of years, sharing conference platforms, trying out new ideas and exchanging areas of expertise. What unites our efforts in this book is a general mission to move beyond the ‘sources and analogues’ approach that has tended to characterise studies of Chaucer and the Italian tradition, and to explore new perspectives and methodologies that advance our understanding of the ways in which Chaucer,