Chaucer and the Challenges of Medievalism honors the extraordinary academic career of H. A. Kelly, whose scholarship covers a wide variety of topics, including medieval and Renaissance literature and history, ecclesiastical history and theology, and philology. In recognition of his broad historical sweep, authors addressed in this volume range from Aristotle to Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, though, in the interest of cohesion, the contributions focus primarily on English medieval literature and philology, and on closely related European and historical fields. Theoretically and...

Medieval Venuses and Cupids analyses the transformations of the love deities in later Middle English Chaucerian poetry, academic Latin discourses on classical myth (including astrology, natural philosophy, and commentaries on classical Roman literature), and French conventions that associate Venus and Cupid with Ovidian arts of love. Whereas existing studies of Venus and Cupid contend that they always and everywhere represent two loves (good and evil), the author argues that medieval discourses actually promulgate diverse, multiple, and often contradictory meanings for the deities. The book...