Medieval to Renaissance in English Poetry
- Author / Editor
- Spearing, A. C.
Medieval to Renaissance in English Poetry
- Published
- Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.
- Description
- Rewriting literary history from Chaucer to Spenser, Spearing challenges C. S. Lewis's view that Chaucer "medievalized" his Renaissance-oriented sources, especially Boccaccio and Dante.
- Directed by his experience of Italian culture, Chaucer himself originated the "Renaissance" in England--in his sense of the exalted nature of poetry and of English as a modern European vernacular and in his awareness of the autonomy of the past,his relationship to it, and the possibility of recreating it in poetic fiction.
- Chaucer can be seen as a Renaissance poet whose work was "medievalized" by admiring but uncomprehending successors. Chapter 2 develops the idea of medieval and Renaissance in Chaucer, centering on HF, TC, Th, KnT, WBT, SqT, FranT; chap. 3, the Chaucerian tradition in Lydgate and Hoccleve; chaps. 5 and 6, the Scottish Chaucerians, Henryson and Dunbar, and other writers influenced by Chaucer.
- Asection enttitled "Father Chaucer" (pp. 88-110) reprinted in Daniel J. Pinti, "Writings After Chaucer" (New York and London: Garland, 1998), pp. 145-66.
- Chaucer Subjects
- Background and General Criticism.
- Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations.
- Chaucer's Influence and Later Allusion.