Craft and Anti-Craft in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales
- Author / Editor
- Fields, Peter John.
Craft and Anti-Craft in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales
- Published
- Lewistown, N.Y. : Edwin Mellen Press, 2001.
- Physical Description
- v, 490 pp.
- Description
- Chaucer's interest in craft goes far beyond mere technical process. In CT, the word and its derivations emblematize human efforts to control the world through personal expertise and learned tradition. Fields challenges notions of Chaucer's pluralism, assessing the self-elevation of the Wife of Bath, the resentment of the Squire, and the mystification of CYT and its counteractive concern with humility. He also examines privy knowledge as divine privilege and contrasts the nova artis and dolus of Venus in Virgil's Aeneid with the simple rhetoric of Cecilia in SNT and the speaker of PrT. Later chapters discuss craft and the development of early Christian epistemology in King Alfred's Boethius, and the craft of humanist narrative.
- Chaucer Subjects
- Canterbury Tales--General.
- Language and Word Studies.
- Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations.
- Wife of Bath and Her Tale.
- Canon's Yeoman and His Tale.
- Second Nun and Her Tale.
- Prioress and Her Tale.