'His Desir Wol Fle Withouten Wynges': Mary and Love in Fourteenth-Century Poetry
- Author / Editor
- Boitani, Piero.
'His Desir Wol Fle Withouten Wynges': Mary and Love in Fourteenth-Century Poetry
- Published
- Joerg O. Fichte, ed. Chaucer's Frame Tales (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 83-128.
- Description
- Examines Marian prayers and images in Dante, de Guilleville, Petrarch, and Chaucer, who use prayers to the Virgin at crucial moments in their works. A comparative study illuminates religious ideals and narrative strategies in CT (PrT, SNT), TC, and ABC.
- ABC represents the form in transition. Starting with a French abecedarium, Chaucer explores several modes--"historical, figural, emotional, humble, and high"--but settles on none. He transforms the prayer to the Virgin into a private lyric, increasing the emotional quality. SNT and PrT are an "ideal pair of hagiographic visions of central Christian truths."
- Reprinted in Piero Boitani, The Tragic and the Sublime in Medieval Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (1989), pp. 177-222.
- Alternative Title
- Chaucer's Frame Tales.
- The Tragic and the Sublime in Medieval Literature.
- Chaucer Subjects
- Sources, Analogues and Literary Relations.
- ABC
- Prioress and Her Tale.
- Second Nun and Her Tale.
- Troilus and Criseyde.