For Elizabethans, modern English literary history began with Chaucer. Looking back, they say him as a noble primitive, a genius in spite of the barbarity of his age and language. In this book, Alice Miskimin attempts a new kind of comparative literary history, combining both historical perspective and critical close reading to reexamine England's Homer in the light of the two-hundred year period of transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. A survey of the emergence of the Chaucer canon from manuscript to print shows how progressive corruption changed the texts and how the introduction of apocryphal poems into the early editions of Chaucer's published Works affected the Renaissance image of the Father of English Poetry. The history of Troilus and Criseyde, in particular, from its medieval origins in Boccaccio and Chaucer to the Renaissance imitations of Henryson, Shakespeare, and Dryden, is a paradigm of literary metamorphosis.Other perspectives on the evolution of Chaucer's poetry are found in Spenser's deliberate reinterpretations (in The Faerie Queene and The Shepherd's Calendar) and in the Elizabethans' apprehension of the poet's personae-the Canterbury pilgrim the dreamer of the vision poems, the historian of Troilus and Criseyde.The Renaissance Chaucer is a skillful recreation of Chaucer as he appeared to Elizabethan authors. It is a provocative and a successful attempt to get beyond simple influence in literary and cultural history.

Provides a rich and varied reference resource, illuminating the different contexts for Chaucer and his work.

"A fine historic exploration of why marriage treatments in literary texts are transformed between the 14th and 16th centuries. . . . This volume has the power and evidence--both historic and textual--to revamp our understanding of crucial texts. . . . I will never read Chaucerian texts of wives and widows the same again!"--Jean E. Jost, Bradley University "An extremely readable study of literary responses to changing marriage law, including an in-depth study of Chaucer and a wide-ranging examination of Renaissance dramatists."--Emily A. Detmer, Millikin University From the 14th century to the middle of the 17th, changes in marriage law affected literary depictions of marriage in marked ways, according to Kathryn Jacobs's astute interdisciplinary treatment of nuptial contracts. She relates the changes in marriage law and also the enforcement policies of church courts to the changing literary treatment of marriage in Chaucer's work, in medieval mystery plays, and in the Renaissance plays of the late 16th and early 17th centuries. When Chaucer was writing his Canterbury Tales, Jacobs argues, the marriage contract was well known to his audience. He could therefore count on them to recognize the parallels he draws between this familiar contract and the extramarital or postmarital "contracts" he designed. The mystery plays, meanwhile, were popular precisely because they violated the marriage contract as it was commonly known. By the Renaissance, however, church law had changed drastically, and the drama reflected public resentment and confusion about the new policies. One of the unexpected results of this was the birth of the "lusty widow" as a stage fantasy figure. Focusing first on Chaucer and then on drama, Jacobs offers a bridge between the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, showing how the lives of everyday people in each age were affected by the handling of marriage law in the ecclesiastical courts. Kathryn Jacobs, associate professor of literature and languages at Texas A&M University in Commerce, Texas, is the author of articles in such journals as Chaucer Review and Mediaevalia.

"Eleven essays that explore how modern scholarship interprets Chaucer's writings"--Provided by publisher.

The literary influence of alchemy and hermeticism in the work of most medieval and early modern authors has been overlooked. Stanton Linden now provides the first comprehensive examination of this influence on English literature from the late Middle Ages through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Drawing extensively on alchemical allusions as well as on the practical and theoretical background of the art and its pictorial tradition, Linden demonstrates the pervasiveness of interest in alchemy during this three-hundred-year period. Most writers -- including Langland, Gower, Barclay, Eramu.

Details the evolution of literature during a period representing a staggering amount of change, moving from one-dimensional action stories and religious lessons to stories with subtleties of plot and character development.

This critical book studies in depth the transition from the 'medieval' to the 'Renaissance' periods in English literature.