Language and the Declining World in Chaucer, Dante, and Jean de Meun [Paperback]

This book examines how Chaucer, Dante, and Jean de Meun represented medieval debates on the origin and history of language?This book focuses on three major poets - Chaucer, Dante, and Jean de Meun - within the context of medieval commentaries on the origin and history of language.This book focuses on three major poets - Chaucer, Dante, and Jean de Meun - within the context of medieval commentaries on the origin and history of language.Medieval commentaries on the origin and history of language used biblical history, from Creation to the Tower of Babel, as their starting-point, and described the progressive impairment of an originally perfect language. Biblical and classical sources raised questions for both medieval poets and commentators about the nature of language, its participation in the Fall, and its possible redemption. John M. Fyler focuses on how three major poets - Chaucer, Dante, and Jean de Meun - participated in these debates about language. He offers new analysis of how the history of language is described and debated in the Divine Comedy, the Canterbury Tales and the Roman de la Rose. While Dante follows the Augustinian idea of the Fall and subsequent redemption of language, Jean de Meun and Chaucer are skeptical about the possibilities for linguistic redemption and resign themselves, at least half-comically, to the linguistic implications of the Fall and the declining world.Acknowledgements; List of abbreviations; 1. The Biblical history of language; 2. Love and language in Jean de Meun; 3. Dante and Chaucer's Dante; 4. The prison-house of language; Notes; Primary sources; Bibliography; Index. In this stimulating book, Professor Fyler seeks to explore the ways in which Chaucer, Dante and Jean de Meun come to terms with the question of the origins of language and its decline since the Fall of Man...[This book] stands as a powerful and sophisticated reading of Chaucer and his great vernacular auctores and will be read with profit by anyone interested ilƒS