3.75

I mean, Chaucer himself tells you you should really just go read Virgil and Dante instead.

Though I mainly focused on the parts featuring Medea, I enjoyed this collection and found it insightful to my studies.

read for a university year one, semester two narratives of witchcraft class.

* not in Middle English

Bonus points for the Meda comments. Love you Geoff!

Good grief, that was some hard work! Phenomenal in places and boring in others Chaucer's Love Visions is poetic, romantic and damn confusing. Now I just need to find the courage to move onto The Canterbury Tales.

Call me ignorant, but I thought this was going to be lyrically romantic. Instead it was full of women who are raped and then have their tongues cut out or who have sex with bulls while in wooden cow outfits. What did I expect from a medieval take on Greek mythology? The frequently flippantly gruesome tone was unnerving. I annoyed my family while reading it by going around speaking in rhyming couplets. The notes at the end were interesting but I have to say I'm glad its over.

The Book of the Duchess is the first major work of the English poet Geoffrey Chaucer.

Composed c. 1370 CE in honor of Blanche, Duchess of Lancaster (l. 1342-1368 CE), wife of John of Gaunt (l. 1340-1399 CE), Duke of Lancaster and Chaucer's best friend. Blanche died in 1368 CE, probably from the plague, at the age of 26, and John of Gaunt mourned her for the rest of his life even though he would remarry. The Book of the Duchess is thought to have been composed on the second anniversary of her death. It may have been commissioned by John of Gaunt and was read at Blanche's memorial service on the two-year anniversary of her death. The poem was clearly appreciated by John of Gaunt as, afterwards, he rewarded Chaucer with a grant of ten pounds a year for life, at that time equal to almost a year's salary.

The poem is written in Middle English and belongs to the literary genre known as the high medieval dream vision in which a narrator opens by relating some problem he is experiencing and then falls asleep, has a dream which suggests or clearly reveals a solution to the problem, and wakes feeling at peace or resigned to his situation. Chaucer's piece deviates from this form in that the narrator never claims to have resolved his problem through the dream; the poem ends simply with him saying he woke and wrote the dream down.

The poem relies on an audience's acquaintance with the romantic vision of courtly love, a poetic genre of medieval literature developed in Southern France in the 12th century CE which frequently featured a knight hopelessly in love and devoted to a lady.

Since he cannot sleep, the narrator reads a book (Ovid's Metamorphosis, though the title is never given) containing the story of the lovers Seys (usually given as Ceyx) and Alcyone. Seys goes on a sea voyage and, when he fails to return on the given day, Alcyone begins to worry. She prays to the goddess Juno for a sign of whether Seys still lives and her prayer is answered in the form of Morpheus, god of sleep, appearing as Seys to tell her he is dead. Alcyone dies of grief three days later (lines 62-214). The narrator then marvels at the story and how Alcyone received an answer to her prayer when he has not and so he prays to Juno, almost instantly falls asleep, and begins to dream (lines 215-291).

The Parliament of Fowls

The idea that Valentine’s Day is a day for lovers is thought to originate with Geoffrey Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls, a poem written in the late 14th century. It describes a group of birds which gather together in the early spring – on ‘seynt valentynes day’ – to choose their mates for the year.

The Parliament of Fowls is a dream-vision. In its opening section, it describes how the narrator falls asleep while reading Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis [The Dream of Scipio], and then dreams of the parliament of birds which follows. The dream-vision was a common motif in the literature of the Middle Ages. It was used in multiple different ways by poets of the period.

Legend of Good Women

A dream-vision, it imagines a narrator, who encounters the God of Love and his queen, Alceste. The narrator (whose identity is never revealed) is reprimanded by the God of Love and Alceste for the presentation of women in his previous works. This frame-story proceeds into a sequence of stories about famous women from history and mythology. In the Legend, Chaucer uses narratives which he alludes to elsewhere in his work: the stories of Medea, Phyllis, Ariadne and Dido.

House of Fame

An unfinished dream‐poem. After the prologue on dreams and the invocation to the god of sleep, the poet falls asleep
has a dream in which he is inside a temple made of glass, filled with beautiful art and shows of wealth. After seeing an image of Venus, Vulcan, and Cupid, he deduces that it is a temple to Venus. The poet explores the temple until he finds a brass tablet recounting the Aeneid.

He goes into much further detail during the story of Aeneas’s betrayal of Dido, after which he lists other women in Greek mythology who were betrayed by their lovers, which led to their deaths. He gives examples of the stories of Demophon of Athens and Phyllis, Achilles and Breseyda, Paris and Aenone, Jason and Hypsipyle and later Medea, Hercules and Dyanira, and finally Theseus and Ariadne.

Chaucer finishes recounting the Aeneid from the brass tablet, and then decides to go outside to see if he can find anyone who can tell him where he is. He finds that outside the temple is a featureless field, and he prays to Christ to save him from hallucination and illusion. He looks up to the sky and sees a golden eagle that begins to descend towards him, marking the end of the first book.

When the second book begins, Chaucer has attempted to flee the swooping eagle but is caught and lifted up into the sky. Chaucer faints, and the eagle rouses him by calling his name. The eagle explains that he is a servant of Jove, who seeks to reward Chaucer for his unrewarded devotion to Venus and Cupid by sending him to the titular House of the goddess Fame, who hears all that happens in the world.