An Ars Legendi for Chaucer's Canterbury Tales
- Author / Editor
- Frese, Dolores Warwick.
An Ars Legendi for Chaucer's Canterbury Tales
- Published
- Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1991.
- Physical Description
- x, 338 pp.
- Description
- The twofold purpose of this study is "first, to demonstrate the originality and complexity of Chaucer's intertextual practice . . .; second, to advance the claims of the Ellesmere manuscript as the poetic text best reflecting Chaucer's final authorial intentions in the matter of narrative ordering for the Tales." Frese uses the related rhetorical principles of "involucrum" and "integumentum" to reread beneath GP and a number of free-floating fragments to identify "the poetic matrix
- of number as central to Chaucer's hermeneutics in this poem."; it is this matrix that points to the correct order of CT. Chaucer was aware, however, of the textual contamination that CT suffered in transmission. In CYT, he describes himself as the Canon, a scribe as the Yeoman, and various textual corruptions as alchemical tricks.
- Chaucer Subjects
- Canterbury Tales--General
- Canon's Yeoman and His Tale.
- Manuscripts and Textual Studies.