Il Filostrato

Seminar paper from the year 2005 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1.3, University of Cologne (English Department), course: Medieval English Literature: Chaucer and his Contemporaries, language: English, abstract: The story of Troilus and Criseyd has been told many times by different authors during the centuries. Within this term paper a closer look will be taken at the works of Geoffrey Chaucer's Troilus & Criseyde and Giovanni Boccaccio' Il Filostrato to illustrate that the story of Troilus and Criseyde can be interpreted from two different angles. Whereas, Giovanni Boccaccio focuses on the consequences of the relationship between Troilus and Criseyde within his work, Chaucer seems to be much more focused on the development of love in general- using the story of Troilus and Criseyde as a metaphor. Therefore, Chaucer uses the relationship between Troilus and Criseyde to present in what way the perception of love can change from happiness in to sorrow. To be able to narrow down and define the intentions of Boccaccio and Chaucer the central aspect will be lain on the presentation of the relationship between Troilus, Criseyde & Pandarus. Since the relationship between Troilus and Criseyde would neither start, nor find its fulfilling without the inference of Pandarus, the character of Pandarus gains a specific position within the relationship of Troilus and Criseyde. Furthermore, an analysis of the relationship between these three characters might give an answer in what way both Chaucer and Boccaccio represent their attitude towards the central theme of love. By concentrating on the ménage a trois between the characters, it is furthermore possible to analyse which position Pandarus inherits and in what way he uses or abuses it. Consequently, the question needs to be solved why Chaucer represents Pandarus as Criseyde's uncle, whereas he is 'only' Criseyde's cousin within Boccaccio's poem. Therefore, the role of Pandarus.

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First full study of Chaucer's readings and translations of Petrarch suggests a far greater influence than has hitherto been accepted..

This edition presents all of the surviving manuscripts, together with textual apparatus and commentary. The poem is also presented in parallel with its principal source, Boccaccio's "Filostrato", enabling the reader to compare the two poems in charting the evolution and achievement of Chaucer's "Troilus". This edition has been revised and corrected in order to make the text fully accessible to the reader unfamiliar with Chaucer's work. An introduction discusses the text, metre and sources of "Troilus" and assesses the literary importance of Chaucer's translation method..

A wide-ranging exploration of the creative power of literary tradition, from Chaucer to the present In literary and cultural studies, "tradition" is a word everyone uses but few address critically. In Reading Old Books, Peter Mack offers a wide-ranging exploration of the creative power of literary tradition, from the middle ages to the twenty-first century, revealing in new ways how it helps writers and readers make new works and meanings. Reading Old Books argues that the best way to understand tradition is by examining the moments when a writer takes up an old text and writes something new out of a dialogue with that text and the promptings of the present situation. The book examines Petrarch as a user, instigator, and victim of tradition. It shows how Chaucer became the first great English writer by translating and adapting a minor poem by Boccaccio. It investigates how Ariosto, Tasso, and Spenser made new epic meanings by playing with assumptions, episodes, and phrases translated from their predecessors. It analyzes how the Victorian novelist Elizabeth Gaskell drew on tradition to address the new problem of urban deprivation in Mary Barton. And, finally, it looks at how the Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, in his 2004 novel Wizard of the Crow, reflects on biblical, English literary, and African traditions. Drawing on key theorists, critics, historians, and sociologists, and stressing the international character of literary tradition, Reading Old Books illuminates the not entirely free choices readers and writers make to create meaning in collaboration and competition with their models..

THE OXFORD HISTORY OF LITERARY TRANSLATION IN ENGLISH General Editors: Peter France and Stuart Gillespie This groundbreaking five-volume history runs from the Middle Ages to the year 2000. It is a critical history, treating translations wherever appropriate as literary works in their own right, and reveals the vital part played by translators and translation in shaping the literary culture of the English-speaking world, both for writers and readers. It thus offers new and often challenging perspectives on the history of literature in English. As well as examining the translations and their wider impact, it explores the processes by which they came into being and were disseminated, and provides extensive bibliographical and biographical reference material. Volume 1 of The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English originates with what medievalists have long known, that virtually everything written in the Middle Ages in English can be regarded, one way or another, as a translation, and that medieval understandings of what constitutes literature were significantly more generous than many modern ones. It uses modern as well as medieval understandings of translation to inform its discussions (the two understandings have a great deal in common), and it aims to situate medieval translation in English as fully as possible in its various cultural contexts: this includes, in particular, the complicated inter-relations of translation throughout the period into Latin, and (for the Middle English period) of translation in French. Since it also understands the Middle Ages of its title as including the first half of the sixteenth century, it studies what has survived of nearly a thousand years of translation activity in England..

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Geoffrey Chaucer has long been considered by the critics as the father of English poetry. However, this notion not only tends to forget a huge part of the history of Anglo-Saxon literature but also to ignore the specificities of Chaucer’s style. Indeed, Chaucer’s decision to write in Middle English, in a time when the hegemony of Latin and Old French was undisputed (especially at the court of Edward III and Richard II), was consistent with an intellectual movement that was trying to give back to European vernaculars the prestige necessary to a genuine cultural production, which eventually led to the emergence of romance and of the modern novel. As a result, if Chaucer cannot be thought of as the father of English poetry, he is, however, the father of English prose and one of the main artisans of what Mikhail Bakhtin called the polyphonic novel..

The monograph series Oxford Studies in Medieval Literature and Culture showcases the plurilingual and multicultural quality of medieval literature and actively seeks to promote research that not only focuses on the array of subjects medievalists now pursue in literature, theology, and philosophy, in social, political, jurisprudential, and intellectual history, the history of art, and the history of science but also that combines these subjects productively. It offers innovative studies on topics that may include, but are not limited to, manuscript and book history; languages and literatures of the global Middle Ages; race and the post-colonial; the digital humanities, media and performance; music; medicine; the history of affect and the emotions; the literature and practices of devotion; the theory and history of gender and sexuality, ecocriticism and the environment; theories of aesthetics; medievalism. Reading for form can mean reading for formation. Understanding processes through which a text was created can help us in characterizing its form. But what is involved in bringing a diachronic process to bear upon a synchronic work? When does literary formation begin and end? When does form happen? These questions emerge with urgency in the interactions between English poet Geoffrey Chaucer and Italian trecento authors Dante Alighieri, Giovanni Boccaccio, and Francis Petrarch. In fourteenth-century Italy, new ways were emerging of configuring the relation between author and reader. Previously, medieval reading was often oriented around the significance of the text to the individual reader. In Italy, however, reading was beginning to be understood as a way of getting back to a work's initial formation. This book tracks how concepts of reading developed within Italian texts, including Dante's Vita nova, Boccaccio's Filostrato and Teseida, and Petrarch's Seniles, impress themselves upon Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde and Canterbury Tales. It argues that Chaucer's poetry reveals the implications of reading for formation: above all, that it both depends upon and effaces the historical perspective and temporal experience of the individual reader. Problems raised within Chaucer's poetry thus inform this book's broader methodological argument: that there is no one moment at which the formation of Chaucer's poetry ends; rather its form emerges in and through process of reading within time..

A distinguished academic, influential Christian apologist, and best-selling author of children's literature, C. S. Lewis is a controversial and enigmatic figure who continues to fascinate, fifty years after his death. This Companion is a comprehensive single-volume study written by an international team of scholars to survey Lewis's career as a literary historian, popular theologian, and creative writer. Twenty-one expert voices from the University of Oxford, the University of Cambridge, Princeton University, and Wheaton College, among many other places of learning, analyze Lewis's work from theological, philosophical, and literary perspectives. Some chapters consider his professional contribution to fields such as critical theory and intellectual history, while others assess his views on issues including moral knowledge, gender, prayer, war, love, suffering, and Scripture. The final chapters investigate his work as a writer of fiction and poetry. Original in its approach and unique in its scope, this Companion shows that C. S. Lewis was much more than merely the man behind Narnia..

The Profession of Widowhood explores how the idea of ‘true’ widowhood was central to pre-modern ideas concerning marriage and of female identity more generally. The medieval figure of the Christian vere vidua or “good” widow evolved from and reinforced ancient social and religious sensibilities of chastity, loyalty and grief as gendered ‘work.’ The ideal widow was a virtuous woman who mourned her dead husband in chastity, solitude, and most importantly, in perpetuity, marking her as “a widow indeed” (1 Tim 5:5). The widow who failed to display adequate grief fulfilled the stereotype of the ‘merry widow’ who forgot her departed spouse and abused her sexual and social freedom. Stereotypes of widows ‘good’ and ‘bad’ served highly-charged ideological functions in pre-modern culture, and have remained durable even in modern times, even as Western secular society now focuses more on a woman’s recovery from grief and possible re-coupling than the expectation that she remain forever widowed. The widow represented not only the powerful bond created by love and marriage, but also embodied the conventions of grief that ordered the response when those bonds were broken by premature death. This notion of the widow as both a passive memorial to her husband and as an active ‘rememberer’ was rooted in ancient traditions, and appropriated by early Christian and medieval authors who used “good” widowhood to describe the varieties of female celibacy and to define the social and gender order. A tradition of widowhood characterized by chastity, solitude, and permanent bereavement affirmed both the sexual mores and political agenda of the medieval Church. Medieval widows—both holy women recognized as saints and ‘ordinary women’ in medieval daily life—recognized this tradition of professed chastity in widowhood not only as a valuable strategy for avoiding remarriage and protecting their independence, but as a state with inherent dignity that afforded opportunities for spiritual development in this world and eternal merit in the next..

The poet and scholar Giovanni Boccaccio was a leading writer of the Italian Renaissance, now best remembered as the author of the famous compendium of tales ‘The Decameron’. Boccaccio helped lay the foundations for the humanism of the Renaissance, while raising vernacular literature to the status of the classics of antiquity. Noted for their realistic dialogue and imaginative use of character and plot, Boccaccio’s works went on to inspire Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare and countless other writers in the ensuing centuries. This comprehensive eBook presents Boccaccio’s collected works, with numerous illustrations, rare translations appearing in digital print for the first time, informative introductions and the usual Delphi bonus material. (Version 1) * Beautifully illustrated with images relating to Boccaccio’s life and works * Concise introductions to the novels and other texts * Multiple translations of ‘The Decameron’, including the first English translation by John Florio, 1620 * John Payne's complete translation, with all the hyperlinked footnotes - ideal for students * The original Italian text of ‘The Decameron’ * Rare translations of two novels, with individual contents tables * Images of how the books were first published, giving your eReader a taste of the original texts * Excellent formatting of the texts * The rare long poem ‘Il Filostrato’, available in no other collection * The key works of Chaucer and Shakespeare that were inspired by Boccaccio * Includes a translation of Boccaccio’s ‘De Mulieribus Claris’, first time in digital print * Features two biographies - discover Boccaccio’s intriguing life * Scholarly ordering of texts into chronological order and literary genres Please visit www.delphiclassics.com to browse through our range of exciting titles CONTENTS: The Decameron The Decameron: John Florio, 1620 The Decameron: John Payne, 1886 The Decameron: J. M. Rigg, 1903 The Decameron: Original Italian Text The Novels The Filocolo (Translated by H. G., London, 1566) The Elegy of Lady Fiammetta (Translated by Bartholomew Young, 1587) The Verse ‘The Knight’s Tale’ and ‘The Two Noble Kinsmen’ (Teseida) Il Filostrato (Translated by Hubertis Cummings) The Non-Fiction De Mulieribus Claris (Partially translated by Henry Parker, Lord Morely) The Life of Dante (Translated by James Robinson Smith) The Biographies Giovanni Boccaccio: A Biographical Study by Edward Hutton Giovanni Boccaccio by Francis Hueffer Please visit www.delphiclassics.com to browse through our range of exciting titles or to purchase this eBook as a Parts Edition of individual eBooks.

This invaluable guide by Todd F. Davis and Kenneth Womack offers an accessible introduction to two important movements in the history of twentieth-century literary theory. A complementary text to the Palgrave volume Postmodern Narrative Theory by Mark Currie, this new title addresses a host of theoretical concerns, as well as each field's principal figures and interpretive modes. As with other books in the Transitions series, Formalist Criticism and Reader-response Theory includes readings of a range of widely-studied texts, including Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, and F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, among others. Transitions critically explores movements in literary theory. Guiding the reader through the poetics and politics of interpretative paradigms and schools of thought, Transitions helps direct the student's own acts of critical analysis. As well as transforming the critical developments of the past by interpreting them from the perspective of the present day, each study enacts transitional readings of a number of well-known literary texts..

A reading of how women's power is asserted and demonstrated in the popular medieval genre of romance..

Explores provocative questions about the dynamics of cross-cultural translation and the formation of tradition.

A collection of essays debating what fourteenth-century Italy and its literature meant to Chaucer..

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