Pastoral and the Politics of Plague in Machaut and Chaucer
- Author / Editor
- Butterfield, Ardis.
Pastoral and the Politics of Plague in Machaut and Chaucer
- Published
- Studies in the Age of Chaucer 16 (1994): 3-27.
- Description
- Reads BD and Machaut's "Jugement dou Roy de Navarre" as "counter pastorals"--works that both disturb the superficial idealization of pastoral poetry and replicate the social tension latent in the form, a social tension that also reflects contemporary effects of the plague.
- Machaut presents the plague directly in his work and obliquely explores its social impact. Even more obliquely, BD confronts the social upheaval of the Black Death in the relations of the Black Knight and the narrator.
- Chaucer Subjects
- Book of the Duchess.
- Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations.