What Chaucer Did to an 'Orazion' in the 'Filostrato': Calkas's Speech as Deliberative Oratory

Author / Editor
Beal, Rebecca S.

Title
What Chaucer Did to an 'Orazion' in the 'Filostrato': Calkas's Speech as Deliberative Oratory

Published
Chaucer Review 44 (2010): 440-60.

Description
Rubrics in "Filostrato" manuscripts label Calkas's bid to trade a prisoner for his daughter as an "oratory." Chaucer's version of the speech fulfills the formal requirements of a speech arguing "for a particular course of action" and in so doing demonstrates that a rhetorician, unlike a prophet, "can revise the past as he acts to change the future."

Chaucer Subjects
Troilus and Criseyde.