Doctoral Dissertations

Date of Award

8-1997

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Major

English

Major Professor

Thomas J. Heffernan

Abstract

Geoffrey Chaucer denigrates romantic love, emphasizing the suffering it brings, and only rarely celebrating its joys. He holds a dim view of such love, and of the literature to which it gave rise, because he saw sublunary love as only one step in a rather complicated process. Treatments of sublunary or courtly love in Chaucer's works are often joined to the topic of the ascensus mentis ad Deum, the ascent of the mind to God. To grasp the import of the united themes of love and the soul's return to God, we must see that Chaucer's theological cosmos includes the Judeo-Christian God at the summit of a hierarchy that also gives a place to the Greco- Roman deities Chaucer inherited from his auctores: His philosophy holds that human souls progress or fail to progress to their home in God depending on whether they use love wisely or foolishly. Recurrent features of Chaucer's poems, accordingly, include the figures of the path, the guide, and the journey. In the House of Fame, Troilus and Criseyde, and Parliament of Fowls, we find soul- journeys of varying degrees of success; in Legend of Good Women and many of the Canterbury Tales, we find explorations of good and bad love. We see that many of the characters with specious critical reputations, such as the Wife of Bath, the Pardoner, Pandarus and Criseyde, may have more benevolent, Christian inclinations than previously supposed.

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