Building a Goddess: Personifications of Fame from Hesiod to Chaucer.
- Author / Editor
- Breen, Katharine.
Building a Goddess: Personifications of Fame from Hesiod to Chaucer.
- 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. 239-65.
- Description
- Treats Fame's dual nature as goddess and personification in Hesiod, Aeschines, Virgil, and HF. While Chaucer's character echoes the duality of its predecessors, she is not a goddess--"never characterized as a bride or daughter of the Christian God"--but Chaucer uses "Neoplatonic vocabulary . . . to signal that Fame should be understood as having real as well as rhetorical power," dispersing "tydyngs" in a context that is recognizably "late-fourteenth-century London."
- Alternative Title
- Mystics, Goddesses, Lovers, and Teachers
- Chaucer Subjects
- House of Fame
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations