Chaucer's Biblical Poetics
- Author / Editor
- Besserman, Lawrence [L.]
Chaucer's Biblical Poetics
- Published
- Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998.
- Physical Description
- xii, 338 pp.
- Description
- Argues that the Bible is a far more pervasive influence on Chaucer than has been previously recognized. Chaucer uses the Bible or its glosses in most of his writings, responding--through quotation, paraphrase, or allusion--to traditional notions of biblical authority and contemporary concerns about this authority.
- Because Chaucer was torn between the Church's traditional stance that the Bible should not be available to the laity and his feeling that the laity should have direct access to the Bible, it was easy for critics of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to claim him as their ancestor.
- Chaucer Subjects
- Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations.