LGW Flashcards
love with moderation - source
prologue ‘virtue lies in the mean’ the ‘eithk’ - this is alluding to Aristotle’s Politics and Ethics, citing is famous apothegm from Ethics. A advocates the virtues of moderation and the dangers of emotional extremes and its effect on individuals and on the LARGER COMMUNITY.
Aristotlean ideas of social and political virtue - reason, moderation, word and deed etc - all contrbude to the idea of bien commun and the comon port of Chaucer’s english. Chaucer recognises the value of these political virtues
Chaucer was closely associated with Aristotle by his devoted protege Hoccleve, who praised him as ‘heir in philosophy/ To Aristotle in our Tongue’.
chaucer ideal of the mean, the balanced point between excess in emotions and actions, and the dynamics of exchanges within unequal social relationships. unequal parties and extreme emotional states are in every story. Aristotlean idea of the mean
central ideas to the ethics
concept of the mean: moderation, balance and equalization as ideals worth struggling to achieve
Early in the ethics Aristotle depicts a concept of true virtue. to be virtuous is to desire to be virtuous. this sets up Chaucer’s terms of feyned behaviour, the performance but not the substance of virtue. a performance (ß∂©
Influences
- ovid Heroides
- =Book 3 of the Ars Amatoria by Ovid, and Le Jugement dou Rot de Navvarre by Chaucer’s near contemporary Guillaume de Machaut. In both of these the topic is the ‘war of the sexes’. Both use the exemplum technique, and draw attention to its limitations as a method of valid proof. Both make use of traditional heroines.
`Florence
Florence Percival
In the Legends… Ovidian sympathy for women is mingled with Ovidian cynicism
The Palinode
The palinode is defined as a poem in which the poet retracts something said in an earlier poem
- is ‘a name first given to an ode by Stesichorus, in which he recants his attack upon Helen’, and cites Puttenham’s Arte of English Poesie (1589)
- Socrates on palinode: admits that the skill in persuasive speech is everything, and the ultimate end is of little importance.
Ovid’s Ars Amatoria and Remedia Amoris afford examples. These were work of Ovid’s middle age, published about 1 AD.
critic on tone
M.C.E. Shaner ‘although this variation in tone can be a source of genuine pleasure to the reader, it can also be a source of =confusion and uncertainty’
`prologue. narrator.criminal.critic
Sylvia Frederico: the.poet.is.imagining.himself, however comically, as a criminal called to answer a charge o\f mistreating wo\men
sex =scandal
`1383 docs cecily chaumpaigne
`ethics of authorship,
J. Allan Mitchell, in Ethics and Exemplary Narrative in Chaucer and Gower,
uncertainty towards “reading for the moral” (Mitchell 83). The God of Love embodies the opinion of the moralist, by accusing the narrator of an ethical infliction in “makest wise filk fro me withdrawe”(331) and hindering their appreciation of love. He asserts the moral responsibility of authors, demanding that they write, above all, “goon… metres” (563-4). Chaucer expresses a distrustfulness towards this moralist stance on authorship, and attempts to detach himself from ethical responsibility in his text by characterising himself in the narrator to evoke authorial subjectivity.
discuses Chaucer’s “moral dimensions of his art” and its “anti-examplary” preoccupation. he argues that Chaucer’s satirising of any didactic representation does not make the works not exemplary, but rather “problematic examplary”. He continues to define this mode as “not the same as failed or subverted exemplary narratives, because failures and subversions are themselves capable of provoking judgement.” (Chaucer studies 33, 83) Miller’s emphasis on “provoking judgement” harks at a further contributing factor to the ethics of authorship; that being the role of the readers or audience in inflicting their individual ethical response.
`critic on balance single quote
caroline P collette : ‘the idea that balance and equalization are ideals worth struggling to achieve’
critic on silence
the uncomfortable, even antagonistic, relation between silence and violence in the poem’ D. Vance smith
‘chaucer s violence to the form of the ovidian story’
critic satire
harold goddard calls it ‘a most unmerciful satire upon women’
