Writing medieval lives in Dante and Chaucer

According to longstanding assumptions within both medieval scholarship and other fields of literary criticism, people in the Middle Ages not only renounced temporal concerns, but were oblivious to them. The privileging in medieval religion of eternity over temporality, and in medieval hermeneutics, of the spirit over the letter, created a Weltanshauung unaware of time as a diachronic phenomenon. A cursory review of medieval writing, however, suggests that medieval people appreciated the diachronic dimension of time. Medieval thinkers recognized that human perception, while constantly striving toward God's perspective is finally bound by time and therefore necessarily relies on a linear apprehension of events. Moreover, medieval writings about time are inseparable from efforts to describe the individual's progress toward a spiritual state that culminates in his or her reunion with the divine. This dissertation explores the temporal aspect of a number of medieval works. Specifically, I trace the influence of the two chief theorists of medieval time, Augustine and Boethius, on the major works of two poets who were deeply interested in time: Dante and Chaucer. In the introduction, I summarize the historical context and argue for a narratological approach to medieval literature. Chapter 1 discusses Augustine's Confessions and Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy with regard to issues of time and the structuring of past experience. Chapter 2 uses Dante's varying depictions in the Vita Nuova, Convivio and Purgatorio of his relationship with Beatrice as a backdrop against which to explore how he experiments with ways of structuring past experience.{09}Chapter 3 explores how Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde manipulates differently the time of insight for the characters, narrator, and reader in order to demonstrate the impossibility of gaining a perspective free of limitations imposed by time. Chapter 4 compares the unfolding of the Wife of Bath's Prologue to La Vieille's account in the Roman de la Rose and to Jerome's Epistola Adversus Jovinianum , in order show how she challenges antifeminist assumptions about the way women structure and narrate the stories of their lives.