Sacred and profane in Chaucer and late medieval literature
Subtitle: essays in honour of John V. Fleming
By: edited by Robert Epstein and William Robins
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Published: 2010
Place of publication: Toronto
Language: eng
Number of pages: 238
ISBN-13: 9781442640818
Subjects: Secularism in literature; English literature; Criticism and interpretation; History and criticism; Holy, The, in literature
Description: "Literary depictions of the sacred and the secular from the Middle Ages are representative of the era's widely held cultural understandings related to religion and the nature of lived experience. Using late Medieval English literature, including some of Chaucer's writings, these essays do not try to define a secular realm distinct and separate from the divine or religious, but instead analyze intersections of the sacred and the profane, suggesting that these two categories are mutually constitutive rather than antithetical.

With essays by former students of John V. Fleming, the collection pays tribute to the Princeton University professor emeritus through wide-ranging scholarship and literary criticism. Including reflections on depictions of Bathsheba, Troilus and Criseyde, the Legend of Good Women, Chaucer's Pardoner, and Margery Kempe, these essays focus on literature while ranging into history, philosophy, and the visual arts. Taken together, the work suggests that the domain of the sacred, as perceived in the Middle Ages, can variously be seen as having a hierarchical or a complementary relationship to the things of this world."--pub. desc.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.

Includes some text in Latin and Middle English.
Table of contents: title: 1. Introduction: The Sacred, the Profane, and Late Medieval Literature; title: 2. Bathsheba in the Eye of the Beholder: Artistic Depiction from the Late Middle Ages to Rembrandt / David Lyle Jeffrey; title: 3. Susanna's Voice / Lynn Staley; title: 4. The Ends of Love: (Meta)physical Desire in Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde / Jamie Fumo; title: 5. Troilus in the Gutter / William Robins; title: 6. The Suicide of the Legend of Good Woman / Julia Marvin; title: 7. Sacred Commerce: Chaucer's Friar and the Spirit of Money / Robert Epstein; title: 8. How (Not) to Preach: Thomas Waleys and Chaucer's Pardoner / Martin Camargo; title: 9. The Radical, Yet Orthodox, Margery Kempe / Fiona Tolhurst; title: 10. Preface to Fleming / Steven Justice; title: 11. Bibliography of the Scholarship of John V Fleming