Chaucer's Ovidian Arts of Love


Book Description

"Remarkably readable, often witty. . . . This book breaks new and interesting ground by using the life of Ovid as a 'mirror' in which Chaucer saw and perhaps shaped himself. It will have a wide audience of both Chaucerians and classicists."--Julian Wasserman, Loyola University in New Orleans "Thoughtfully and carefully demonstrates how neo-Ovidianism affects Chaucer's poetic outlook."--Liam Purdon, Doane College More than any other poet in Chaucer's library, Ovid was concerned with the game of love. Chaucer learned his sexual poetics from Ovid, and his fascination with Ovidian love strategies is prominent in his own writing. This book is the fullest study of Ovid and Chaucer available and the only one to focus on love, desire, and the gender-power struggles that Chaucer explores through Ovid. Michael Calabrese begins by recounting medieval biographical data on Ovid, indicating the breadth of Ovid's influence in the Middle Ages and the depth of Chaucer's knowledge of the Roman poet's life and work. He then examines two of Chaucer's most enduring and important works--Troilus and The Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale--in light of Ovid's turbulent corpus, maintaining that both poems ask the same Ovidian question: What can language and game do for lovers? Calabrese concludes by examining Chaucer's views of himself as a writer and of the complex relations between writer, text, and audience. "Chaucer, like Ovid, saw himself as vulnerable to the misunderstanding and woe that can befall a maker of fictions," he writes. "Like Ovid, Chaucer explores both the delights and also the dangers of being a 'servant of the servants of love.'. . . Now he must consider the personal, spiritual implications of being a verbal artist and love poet." Michael A. Calabrese is assistant professor of English at California State University, Los Angeles. His works on Chaucer have appeared in Chaucer Review, Studies in Philology, and other journals.




The Oxford Handbook of Chaucer


Book Description

As the 'father' of the English literary canon, one of a very few writers to appear in every 'great books' syllabus, Chaucer is seen as an author whose works are fundamentally timeless: an author who, like Shakespeare, exemplifies the almost magical power of poetry to appeal to each generation of readers. Every age remakes its own Chaucer, developing new understandings of how his poetry intersects with contemporary ways of seeing the world, and the place of the subject who lives in it. This Handbook comprises a series of essays by established scholars and emerging voices that address Chaucer's poetry in the context of several disciplines, including late medieval philosophy and science, Mediterranean Studies, comparative literature, vernacular theology, and popular devotion. The volume paints the field in broad strokes and sections include Biography and Circumstances of Daily Life; Chaucer in the European Frame; Philosophy and Science in the Universities; Christian Doctrine and Religious Heterodoxy; and the Chaucerian Afterlife. Taken as a whole, The Oxford Handbook of Chaucer offers a snapshot of the current state of the field, and a bold suggestion of the trajectories along which Chaucer studies are likely to develop in the future.




Ovid's Art of Love


Book Description




A Handbook to the Reception of Ovid


Book Description

A Handbook to the Reception of Ovid presents more than 30 original essays written by leading scholars revealing the rich diversity of critical engagement with Ovid’s poetry that spans the Western tradition from antiquity to the present day. Offers innovative perspectives on Ovid’s poetry and its reception from antiquity to the present day Features contributions from more than 30 leading scholars in the Humanities. Introduces familiar and unfamiliar figures in the history of Ovidian reception. Demonstrates the enduring and transformative power of Ovid’s poetry into modern times.




Ovid's Art and the Wife of Bath


Book Description

"In The Blue Eagle at Work, Charles J. Morris, a renowned labor law scholar and preeminent authority on the National Labor Relations Act, uncovers a long-forgotten feature of that act that offers a new approach to the revitalization of the American labor movement and the institution of collective bargaining. He convincingly demonstrates that in private-sector nonunion workplaces, the Act guarantees that employees have a viable right to engage in collective bargaining through a minority union on a members-only basis. As a result of this startling breakthrough, American labor relations may never again be the same. Morris's underlying thesis is based on a meticulous analysis of statutory and decisional law and exhaustive historical research." "The Blue Eagle at Work, which is clear and accessible to general readers as well as specialists, is an essential tool for labor-union officials and organizers, human-resource professionals in management, attorneys practicing in the field of labor and employment law, teachers and students of labor law and industrial relations, and concerned workers and managers who desire to understand the law that governs their relationship." --Book Jacket.




The Art of Courtly Love


Book Description

The social system of 'courtly love' soon spread after becoming popularized by the troubadours of southern France in the twelfth century. This book codifies life at Queen Eleanor's court at Poitiers between 1170 and 1174 into "one of those capital works which reflect the thought of a great epoch, which explain the secret of a civilization."




Chaucer's Italian Tradition


Book Description

Explores provocative questions about the dynamics of cross-cultural translation and the formation of tradition




Reading the Ovidian Heroine


Book Description

This study investigates the reception of Ovid's heroines in Metamorphoses commentaries written between 1100 and 1618. The Ovidian heroine offers a telling window onto medieval and early modern clerical constructions of gender and selfhood. In the context of classical representations of the feminine, the book examines Ovid's engagement of the heroine to explore problems of intentionality. The second part of the study presents commentaries by such clerics as William of Orléans, the "Vulgate" commentator, Thomas Walsingham, and Raphael Regius, illustrating the reception of the Ovidian heroine in medieval France and England as well as in Renaissance Italy and Germany. The works analyzed here show that clerical readings of the feminine in Ovid reflect greater heterogeneity than is commonly alleged. Both moralizing summaries and Latin editions used as schooltexts are discussed.