Chaucer and the Country of the Stars: Poetic Uses of Astrological Imagery

Description: Investigates Chaucer's treatment of astrological imagery, gauging him to be "quite high among the skeptics on the mediaeval scale of belief in astrology" and explicating the tone and meaning of his astrological passages, their comic or satiric effects, the ways they characterize their narrators, and the expectations of their original audience. Attends consistently to literary sources (especially Boccaccio, Dante, Boethius, the Bible, encyclopedias, treatises, and commentaries) and analogues in art and literature, with sustained readings of Mars; the planetary imagery in KnT and TC; "astronomical periphrasis" ("chronographia") in SqT, MerT, FranT, and TC; the horoscope of the Wife of Bath; determinism in MLT (and elsewhere in CT); the opening of CT in GP and its closing in ParsP.

Chaucer Subjects: Background and General Criticism; Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations; Canterbury Tales--General; Troilus and Criseyde; Complaint of Mars; General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales; Knight and His Tale; Man of Law and His Tale; Wife of Bath and Her Tale; Squire and His Tale; Franklin and His Tale; Merchant and His Tale; Parson and His Tale