Search results for ""Author Kathryn L Lynch""

New readings of Chaucer's dream visions, demonstrating his philosophical interests and learning. Chaucer's Philosophical Visions dramatically extends our sense of the fourteenth-century poet's philosophical interests and learning.Arguing that Chaucer was well acquainted with late medieval English Scholasticism, this book offers new readings of four of his earliest major poems, the dream visions: the Book of the Duchess, the House of Fame, the Parliament of Fowls, and the Prologue to the Legend of Good Women. By resituating these poems within the genre of the 'philosophical vision' (epitomized by Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy), these readings demonstrate Chaucer's interest in metaphysics, epistemology, and logic. Indeed, the only intellectual idiom available to Chaucer for exploring the way that the human mind works and the way that words work to express human reality was philosophical language, a language that Chaucer employed with the same technical acumen that he brought to other contemporary learned traditions, like astronomy and natural science. KATHRYN L. LYNCH is the Katharine Lee Bates and Sophie Chantal Hart Professor of English at Wellesley College, Massachusetts.

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The texts are extensively glossed and are accompanied by individual introductions and explanatory annotations. A lightly regularized system of spellings has been adopted. No prior knowledge of Chaucer is assumed. “Contexts” connects the poems to their classical and medieval foundations and includes works by Virgil, Ovid, Cicero, Boethius, Dante, and Boccaccio, among others. From the wealth of scholarly work available, the editor has chosen for “Criticism” six essays that address the poems’ central themes. Contributors include Charles Muscatine, A. C. Spearing, R. T. Lenaghan, Richard Firth Green, Elaine Tuttle Hansen, and Steven Kruger. A Chronology and Selected Bibliography are also included.

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