Gospel Asceticism: Some Chaucerian Images of Perfection

Author / Editor
Fleming, John V.

Title
Gospel Asceticism: Some Chaucerian Images of Perfection

Published
David Lyle Jeffrey, ed. Chaucer and Scriptural Tradition (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1984), pp. 183-95.

Description
For his worldly, depraved clerics, Chaucer draws not on the actual world but on "crabbed Latin texts monkish in their aspirations and unworldly in their doctrines," i.e., upon scriptural exegesis and ascetic theology, as in GP's Summoner, Friar, Pardoner, and Monk and in SumT, FrT, ShT, and MilT. Explains GP's Monk by reference to Peter Damian's "Lettre sur la Toute-Puissance divine" and Dante's "Paradiso" 21.118-20; and the GP Squire and Absolom (MilT), Chaucer's fops, by Jerome.

Alternative Title
Chaucer and Scriptural Tradition.

Chaucer Subjects
Canterbury Tales--General.
General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales.