Rewriting Old Age from Chaucer to Shakespeare: The Invention of English Senex Style.

Published: Ph.D. Dissertation. Cornell University, 2014. Open access at https://ecommons.cornell.edu/handle/1813/36190 (accessed February 3, 2023).

Description: Offers "senex style" as the a label for an particular network of themes of aging, related rhetorical commonplaces, and narrative poses in a range of late-medieval and early modern works, focusing on those where an "I-persona that extols the wisdom, pains, and effects of personal age" resists the putative disabilities of old age, sometimes obliquely, and engages with literary history and authority. Includes analysis of the Reeve, RvT, Chaucer's "authorial pose," and various connections with Scog, Adam, Purse, and their occurrence in British Library MS Additional 22139.

Chaucer Subjects: Style and Versification
Reeve and His Tale
Envoy to Scogan
Adam Scriveyn
Complaint of Chaucer to His Purse
Manuscripts and Textual Studies