Secular Consolation in Chaucer's "Complaint of Mars."

Author / Editor
Murton, Megan.

Title
Secular Consolation in Chaucer's "Complaint of Mars."

Published
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 38 (2016): 75-107.

Description
Describes Chaucer's self-conscious exploration of time in Mars, arguing that in form and content the poem presents an ambivalent, "permeable, and even unstable" view of secularity but also implies the "palpably absent" other of transcendence. More like BD than TC, Mars conveys Boethian consolation that can be characterized as "secular" only if it is realized how secularity entails temporality in medieval understanding.

Chaucer Subjects
Complaint of Mars
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations
Book of the Duchess
Troilus and Criseyde