"Confessing Authority: Literary Immortality and Authorial Salvation in Chaucer's "Retraction."
- Author / Editor
- Berry, Craig A.
"Confessing Authority: Literary Immortality and Authorial Salvation in Chaucer's "Retraction."
- Published
- Steven Rozenski, Joshua Byron Smith, and Claire M. Waters, eds. Mystics, Goddesses, Lovers, and Teachers: Medieval Visions and Their Modern Legacies. Studies in Honour of Barbara Newman (Turnhout: Brepols, 2023), pp. 261-76.
- Description
- Reviews critical approaches to Ret, reading it as both confessional and aesthetic, comparing its duality with those in Purse and the ending of TC, and exploring resonances with ParsT. Assesses Ret as a recantatory formulation that asks its reader-confessors for prayer and commemoration--a confession of authorship that promotes "enduring poetic authority." Addresses the fifteenth-century "pray for Chaucer" tradition and the excision of Ret from editions between the Reformation and the eighteenth century.
- Alternative Title
- Mystics, Goddesses, Lovers, and Teachers
- Chaucer Subjects
- Chaucer's Retraction
Purse
Troilus and Criseyde
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