Standardizing Lay Culture: Secularity in French and English Literature of the Fourteenth Century

Author / Editor
Minnis, Alastair.

Title
Standardizing Lay Culture: Secularity in French and English Literature of the Fourteenth Century

Published
Ursula Schaefer, ed. The Beginnings of Standardization: Language and Culture in Fourteenth-Century England (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2006), pp. 43-60.

Description
Minnis discusses the impact of Aristotelian social and political theory on the rise of a growing lay culture in France and England. Considers similarities among several "discourses of secular power" - including Chaucer's KnT and Gower's advice to princes in Confessio Amantis - and suggests that they are rooted in Aristotle's Ethics, the pseudo-Aristotelian Economics, and related works.

Alternative Title
Beginnings of Standardization: Language and Culture in Fourteenth-Century England.

Chaucer Subjects
Knight and His Tale.