The Saint's Legend as History and as Poetry: An Appeal to Chaucer
- Author / Editor
- Dunn, E. Catherine.
The Saint's Legend as History and as Poetry: An Appeal to Chaucer
- Published
- American Benedictine Review 27 (1976): 357-78.
- Description
- Defines the saint's life as a "poetic genre of fiction with a basic fidelity to the mysteries of grace and Providential care," a product of Latin rhetorical tradition modified by generations of Christian figural thinking. As reflected in the "Acta Sanctorum" series, the Bollandist efforts to impose the "tests of modern historiography" on saints' lives are inappropriate criteria of evaluation even though they do reflect their own brand of historical imagination. Dunn considers SNT, MLT, and ClT as examples of hagiography, commenting on their fusions of the conventions of history, allegory, folk tale, and romance.
- Chaucer Subjects
- Second Nun and Her Tale
- Man of Law and His Tale
- Clerk and His Tale