The Three Temptations: Medieval Man in Search of the World.
- Author / Editor
- Howard, Donald R.
The Three Temptations: Medieval Man in Search of the World.
- Published
- Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1966.
- Physical Description
- xii, 316 pp.
- Description
- Explores the medieval psychology of temptation and sin, anchored in Scripture and patristic writing—the three-fold lures of gluttony (flesh), avarice (world), and vainglory (devil), resisted, ideally, by "contemptus mundi." Treats TC (pp, 79-160) as concerned with courtly love as a representation of fleshly desire. "Piers Plowman" engages economic feudalism and the lure of the world; "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," with chivalry and vainglory. In TC the medieval scale of perfection underlies and negotiates the tensions between sensual and sacred loves, enabling Chaucer to depict secular love as a valid ideal in the ancient pagan world of Troy, which is a "kind of mirror image" of the Christian world of the narrator and audience, albeit hierarchically inferior because ignorant of the fallen nature of humanity.
- Chaucer Subjects
- Troilus and Criseyde
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations