Chaucer, Gower, and the English Rhetorical Tradition.

Published: Ph.D. Dissertation. Stanford University, 1957. Dissertation Abstracts International 17.04 (1957): 849-50.

Description: Reexamines evidence of rhetorical learning in fourteenth-century England, finding it to be slim. Studies Chaucer's "education, his use of rhetorical terms and 'figurae', and his possible links with the 'ars poetica,'" and suggests that he may have gained familiarity with rhetorical tradition in grammar school, but that most of his "alleged borrowings" from rhetorical tradition could more likely have come via Nicholas Trevet and French poetry.

Chaucer Subjects: Style and Versification
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations