Ethics and Enjoyment in Late Medieval Poetry
- Author / Editor
- Rosenfeld, Jessica.
Ethics and Enjoyment in Late Medieval Poetry
- Published
- Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011
- Physical Description
- vii, 245 pp.
- Series
- Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature.
- Description
- Examines pleasure, happiness, and enjoyment in late-medieval literature as it was influenced by Aristotle's "Nicomachean Ethics," mediated by commentaries and the "Roman de la Rose." Considers a balance of intellectualism and voluntarism, and an ethical emphasis on worldly pleasure, in Machaut, Froissart, Langland, Deguileville, and Chaucer. BD contrasts the narrator's ethical numbness with the self-transcending love of Alcyone and of the Black Knight. The "nexus of courtly and clerkly felicity" installs a new kind of Boethianism and animates the ethics of TC where happiness is the end of human desire. Dorigen of FranT embodies an "intellectual and erotic commitment to mutual experience and emotion."
- Chaucer Subjects
- Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations
- Book of the Duchess
- Troilus and Criseyde
- Franklin and His Tale