Reading Women in Late Medieval Europe: Anne of Bohemia and Chaucer's Female Audience

ISBN-13: 9781137544193 / Angielski / Twarda / 2015 / 251 str.

Alfred Thomas

Opis

Geoffrey Chaucer has traditionally been seen as indebted to the great male writers of medieval Europe: Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarch and Guillaume de Machaut. However, little has been written about the European woman who was Queen of England and his possible patron: Anne of Bohemia, daughter of Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV and wife of Richard II. Although Chaucer explicitly compliments the Queen in his work, scholars have been reluctant or unable to engage seriously with the question of her role in Chaucer's oeuvre. This book shows that Anne came from a long line of highly educated and multilingual royal women and he book rereads some of the famous stories from the Canterbury Tales alongside contemporaneous works in Czech, German, and Latin - languages with which the Queen was familiar. Alfred Thomas argues that even if she did not literally commission any of his works, Chaucer seems to have been writing for Anne as an imagined reader and this awareness shaped the way he wrote and what he chose to write.

Recenzje

"Alfred Thomas makes some important advances in our understanding of the affiliations between Bohemia and Britain in the later middle ages - a field of study attracting a rapid growth of interest. This coherent and persuasive study will appeal not only to Chaucerians but also to those working on patronage, cultural transmission, literary influence, gender, saints' lives, and European literature, among many other topics. Alfred Thomas's connectivity with a range of ongoing debates is impressive." - Peter Brown, Professor of English, University of Kent, UK

O autorze

Alfred Thomas is Professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago, USA. He has published eight books, including, Anne's Bohemia: Czech Literature and Society (1310-1420); A Blessed Shore: England and Bohemia from Chaucer to Shakespeare; Prague Palimpsest: Writing, Memory, and the City; and Shakespeare, Dissent, and the Cold War.