Chaucer's 'House of Fame': The Poetics of Skeptical Fideism

Description: HF expresses the "unreliability" of authority, as evident in the "style and structure" of the poem. Defines "fame" as the "body of traditional information that confronted the educated fourteenth-century reader" and shows how and where HF manifests the "skeptical fideism" of late-medieval philosophy by ambiguously asserting and undercutting traditional learning. Surveys the medieval epistemology of two truths or double truth (philosophical and religious) and notes where Chaucer "evades contradiction" in various poetic works, discussing in detail how HF confronts the epistemological ambiguities of truth, dream, science, history, and poetry itself. Reissued in paperback by University of Florida Press, 1994, with a foreword by Michael Near.
The volume is based on the author's dissertation, Dissertation Abstracts International 28.05 (1967): 1782-83A.