Chaucer's Zephirus, Dante's Zefiro, St. Dominic, and the Idea of the 'General Prologue'
- Author / Editor
- Chance, Jane.
Chaucer's Zephirus, Dante's Zefiro, St. Dominic, and the Idea of the 'General Prologue'
- Published
- Jane Chance, ed. The Mythographic Art: Classical Fable and the Rise of the Vernacular in Early France and England (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1990), pp. 177-98.
- Description
- Examines several mythological winds and traces the use of Zephirus as a "revivifying wind" in Isidore, Bersuire, and Boethius. Chaucer uses the myth of Zephirus and Flora in BD to suggest psychological healing; in TC 5.10, for ironic effect; in LGWP, to suggest the marriage of heaven and earth; in the "Legend of Hypermnestra" (LGW 2681), for ironic purposes; and in GP as a "poetic correlative for spiritual renewal."
- Authors before Chaucer (Dante, Boccaccio), and Chaucer in his early work, used Zephirus as an "agent of macrocosmic amd microcosmic life and generation understood on the physical and spiritual--even Christian--levels." Appropriate to the tensions in CT, Zephirus in GP represents a tension between pagan and Christian.
- Alternative Title
- The Mythographic Art: Classical Fable and the Rise of the Vernacular in Early France and England.
- Chaucer Subjects
- General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales.
- Troilus and Criseyde.
- Legend of Good Women.
- Book of the Duchess.