Fallible Authors: Chaucer's Pardoner and Wife of Bath - Couverture rigide

Minnis, Alastair

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 0812240308 ISBN 13 : 9780812240306

Editeur : University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007

Synopsis

Fallible Authors Chaucer's Pardoner and Wife of Bath Alastair Minnis "In pages rich with explication of scholastic, literary, and historical material, Minnis recovers a medieval notion of authorial fallibility."--Seth Lerer, TimesOnline Can an outrageously immoral man or a scandalous woman teach morality or lead people to virtue? Does personal fallibility devalue one's words and deeds? Is it possible to separate the private from the public, to segregate individual failing from official function? Chaucer addressed these perennial issues through two problematic authority figures, the Pardoner and the Wife of Bath. The Pardoner dares to assume official roles to which he has no legal claim and for which he is quite unsuited. We are faced with the shocking consequences of the belief, standard for the time, that immorality is not necessarily a bar to effective ministry. Even more subversively, the Wife of Bath, who represents one of the most despised stereotypes in medieval literature, the sexually rapacious widow, dispenses wisdom of the highest order. This innovative book places these "fallible authors" within the full intellectual context that gave them meaning. Alastair Minnis magisterially examines the impact of Aristotelian thought on preaching theory, the controversial practice of granting indulgences, religious and medical categorizations of deviant bodies, theological attempts to rationalize sex within marriage, Wycliffite doctrine that made authority dependent on individual grace and raised the specter of Donatism, and heretical speculation concerning the possibility of female teachers. Chaucer's Pardoner and Wife of Bath are revealed as interconnected aspects of a single radical experiment wherein the relationship between objective authority and subjective fallibility is confronted as never before. Alastair Minnis is Professor of English at Yale University. He is the author of many articles and books, including Medieval Theory of Authorship, and is coeditor of

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Date d'édition: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0812240308
• ISBN 13: 9780812240306
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 528