'And to the herte she hireselven smot': The Loveris Maladye and the Legitimate Suicides of Chaucer's and Gower's Exemplary Lovers
- Author / Editor
- Sobecki, Sebastian.
'And to the herte she hireselven smot': The Loveris Maladye and the Legitimate Suicides of Chaucer's and Gower's Exemplary Lovers
- Published
- Mediaevalia 25 (2004): 107-21.
- Description
- Victims of lovesickness, lovers who commit suicide in Chaucer and Gower do so by stabbing themselves in the heart, an action not found in their sources. Nor is there medical precedent for regarding the heart as the central organ of the circulatory system. Love melancholy and love mania were regarded as serious medical conditions that helped to legitimate suicide within the courtly tradition. Sobecki draws examples from HF, KnT, LGW, and Confessio Amantis.
- Chaucer Subjects
- Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations.
- House of Fame.
- Knight and His Tale.
- Legend of Good Women.