R-3 Repository :: Browsing by Author "Chance, Jane"

Browsing by Author "Chance, Jane"

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Alchemical discourse in the "Canterbury Tales": Signs of gnosis and transmutation
(1988) Hitchcox, Kathryn Langford; Chance, Jane
Although most critics of the "Canon's Yeoman's Tale" agree that the tale's striking realism and wealth of detail suggest that Chaucer had an extensive knowledge of alchemical lore, they disagree about whether Chaucer condemned alchemy as a heresy or esteemed it as a divine science compatible with Christianity. For, the Canon's Yeoman begins his tale by asserting the impossibility of achieving the Philosopher's Stone, only to end his tale by affirming the Stone's existence, and describing it as a gift from Christ. In the past, most critics have investigated Chaucer's use of alchemical signs in the "Canon's Yeoman's Tale" by discussing medieval alchemy as an obscure laboratory procedure in which Chaucer did or did not have any faith. This study, however, proposes not only to reexamine the significance of Chaucer's references to alchemical apparati, procedures, and philosophy in the "Canon's Yeoman's Tale" but also to show that Chaucer was primarily interested in alchemy as a symbolic language, and that he utilized alchemical signs in both the "Canon's Yeoman's Tale" and the "Second Nun's Tale," which are linked by the prologue of the "Canon's Yeoman's Tale," to explore how discourse itself is a kind of alchemy which mediates between man and God, or physical reality and spiritual reality, to communicate truth and enable the individual to convert from the "old man of Adam" to the "new man in Christ." Both tales begin with references to the baseness of matter, and end with alchemical allusions to the perfection of matter. Since Chaucer presented the alchemical allusions in the "Second Nun's Tale" and the "Canon's Yeoman's Tale" within a penitential framework, he also implied that both alchemy and Christianity seek salvation, which may be understood as the reconciliation of spiritual and physical nature. Chaucer's Parson defines salvation in these terms when he explains, "Than shal men understonde what is the fruyt of penaunce, dots ther as the body of man that whilom was foul and derk is moore cleer than the sonne" (ParsT 1. 1078).
Bernard of Clairvaux and the structure of love in Dante's Commedia
(1984) Morris, Anne C.; Chance, Jane; Huston, J. Dennis; Nelson, Deborah
St. Bernard of Clairvaux is not only Dante's final guide in the Commedia. but the saint's mystical theology has also provided the poet with the means to that end of the beatific vision, the process of love. Bernard’s De Diligendo Deo explains that there are four degrees of love, ranging from the carnal to the ecstatic. These four levels correspond to major divisions in the Commedia and to the characters found in each. Primary, yet sometimes puzzling figures such as Francesca, Cato, Beatrice, and Mary can be understood within the terms of Bernard's concept of love. Furthermore, the traveler Dante himself assents to the Bernardian explanation of Christian love in Canto XXVI of the Paradiso, during the second part of St. John's examination on love. The entire Commedia climaxes in Dante's mystical vision, achieved with the guidance of the character of St. Bernard and fraught with characteristics of Bernard's thought, including his Marian devotion and his emphasis upon grace.
Evian and Magdalenic representations in medieval and Elizabethan drama: The expression of contemporary antifeminism
(1983) Englerth, Rachel; Doughtie, Edward; Chance, Jane; Huston, J. Dennis
Gender nominalized: Unmanning men, disgendering women in Chaucer's "Legend of Good Women"
(1991) Walker-Pelkey, Faye; Chance, Jane
In the Legend, Chaucer manipulates the language of the narrator and the women, turning analytic attention toward the problem of gender categories, thereby undermining proscribed behavior and the language that represents that behavior. Nominalism, with its emphasis on singularity, is particularly suited to the problem of gender categories because it forces attention to the particulars of the man or woman, eventually draining the category of that which gives it substance. Examining the legends closely with the nominalist principle of the particularity of language firmly in mind reveals women who are radically different from one another, who are not faceless victims. Cleopatra, Hypermnestra and Thisbe, for example, are imprisoned in a patriarchial system which rewards passivity and punishes independent thought and action. However, Chaucer allows these three characters to use their bodies and linguistic license to reach beyond the bars of the hierarchical prison, thereby disgendering the text in complex ways. Again, the legends of Lucrece and Dido are connected to Troilus and Criseyde through the exploration of the tension between public and private experiences and the imagery of seeing and invisibility. Finally, Philomela's story is the most anomalous story in the poem, and thus it reveals Chaucer's attempt to reassert a particularized view of experience. These surprisingly clear-cut distinctions between characters, behavior, and reader expectations grow out of attention to the particulars of experience and language. The demand for universals made by Alceste and the God of Love provides a contrast for the close attention to language and experience in the legends themselves.
Hafa nu ond geheald husa selest: Jurisdiction and justice in "Beowulf"
(1992) Day, David D.; Chance, Jane
Anglo-Saxon legal concepts, particularly the principles of feud and dispute resolution, have a demonstrable influence on the themes and narrative structure of Beowulf. Beowulf's three main monster fights, with Grendel, Grendel's mother and the dragon, may be legally analyzed to determine why the hero has greater difficulties in each fight--in each, the hero's antagonist has a progressively stronger legal right to resistance, from the negligible legal position of Grendel up through the very ambiguous legal rights of the dragon in the final fight. An extremely important influence on each fight is the Anglo-Saxon concept of guardianship over place, or mund, which gives a legal dimension to the poem's emphasis on the sacrosanct and inviolable nature of the "close"--the great meadhall Heorot, or the gudsele ("battle-hall") of the Grendel kin or the eordsele ("earth-hall") of the dragon--and the relative justice of armed forays into such spaces.
"Petty magic to experiment": The seventeenth century's Scientific Revolution and the closing of this world to the next
(2004) Zimmer, Mary E.; Chance, Jane
The shift from a traditional, being-based Christian cosmology---in which God creates all things through an ontologically-invested reason in which man shares---to a voluntarist, will-based Christian cosmology---in which God creates all things through an arbitrary act of will knowable to man only through experience---is considered crucial to the rise of empiricism and its related experimental method, two cornerstones of the Scientific Revolution. This dissertation examines how the shift from a being- to a logos-based cosmology, with its entailed shift from a realist to a nominalist ontology, affected this world's relation to a next. It explores this issue by considering the resurrection views of three writers whose works, taken together, span the seventeenth-century both temporally and intellectually, from the vestigial medieval scholasticism of John Donne (1572--1631) through the Renaissance neo-Platonism of Thomas Browne (1605--1682) to the Early-Modern mechanism of Robert Boyle (1627--1691). This dissertation argues that the traditional, being-based cosmologies shared by Donne and Browne underlie their teleological understandings of natural processes and, in doing so, allows them to find evidence in this world for resurrection to the next. Boyle's voluntarist cosmology, on the other hand, banishes inherent teleology from the natural world and thereby silences this world with regard to a next. This dissertation further argues that this shift in cosmology and more specifically, the entailed shift from a realist to a nominalist ontology, allowed man to make nature speak a new, operational language that could be used to man's benefit. By considering works written around the time of London's 1665 plague, we will see how mechanistic medicine produced such operational knowledge through the use of human-made instruments and methods, including experimentation. Although such knowledge provides no intelligence about a next world, it does allow humanity to make its way better in this one.
Sarpedon's feast: A Homeric key to Chaucer's "Troilus and Criseyde"
(1995) Bradley, Ann; Chance, Jane
Chaucer's insistence on the name of Sarpedon signals the importance of the Iliad, with its treatment both of the hero and the theme of necessity, for the development of his Troilus. Chaucer's access to the Iliad was second hand through the Italians who were cultural heirs to the Greeks. The story of Homer's Troy reached Chaucer through three traditions: the classical, euhemeristic, and epic recountings of the people and gods of Troy; the romance tales of the fall of Troy and its lovers; the Christian mythographic allegorizing of the Trojan material. The mythographic is itself an offshoot of the epic because it also treats of Gods and men while the romance debunks the otherworldly in favor of earthly affairs. Finally, Chaucer takes a pagan tale, views it through a Dantean lens, and presents it to a fourteenth century Christian audience, integrating the romance back into the epic by expanding its scope beyond the material universe ruled by fate to a world within the Dantean universe which uses fate as an instrument of Providence but leaves men free to choose. Chaucer's Troilus, developed from Priam's two word epitaph to the hero and derived from Sarpedon, Achilles, and Hector, becomes more understandable in light of Sarpedon's acknowledgment of fate and assertion of will. Chapter One traces Sarpedon and necessity from Homer to Chaucer through the epic material about Troy. Chapter Two develops the emergence of Chaucer's Troilus from the suppressed deeds and characteristics of Homer's Sarpedon, Achilles, and Hector. Chapter Three examines Chaucer's adaptation of the mythographic method. In place of Christian allegoresis he employs myth as subtext, using Sarpedon's feast as a center of a debate about fate and using Cassandra to join the fates of Thebes to Troy and Troy to London. Chapter Four explores the Thomistic synthesis, examining the necessity soliloquy as scholastic parody and comic center for Chaucer's theme of fate and will and using Dantes's Purgatorio to interpret Troilus' Christian apotheosis, beyond the pagan apotheosis of Sarpedon's immortalization as hero, by Troilus' removal to the spheres of the Dantean universe.
The feminine corpus in F. J. Child's collection of the English and Scottish popular ballads
(1998) Lutz, Gretchen Kay; Chance, Jane
The ballads examined here are from F. J. Child's The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, the authoritative collection of ballads. Though definitions of the ballad vary, most agree that the ballad is an orally transmitted folksong that tells a story. The Child ballad collection has stood a solitary monument from its publication (1882-1894). In it Child brought together from manuscripts and printed sources all of the extant English and Scottish ballads that he regarded as authentic. Though Child's work itself was groundbreaking, exploring territory marginal to the sort of academic study making up his official duties as professor of English at Harvard, his collection soon became canonical, subjected to critical study as a sub-genre. Perhaps because Child himself died before he could write his essay on what the ballads were and what they meant, since Child's death, much of the critical work has been an attempt to fill in what was left undone by Child, that is, defining the ballad and analyzing the criteria by which Child made his choices. In more recent times, critical studies of Child's works have applied psychoanalytic and feminist critiques to selected ballads. Yet, no previous work has examined the relationship of Child himself to his collection. This work sets out to view the Child collection in terms of literary critical theory, showing that Child's collecting is an act of Lacanian paternity whereby the collector, attracted especially by the bodies of the female characters, is moved to bring all the ballads under his dominion yet is subverted in his desire for dominion as female characters present themselves in terms of "bodytalk." Chapter one shows Child's collecting as Lacanian paternity. Chapter two focuses on the presentation of women's bodies in the ballads, The final chapter shows that the women characters in selected ballads speak according to what critic Jane Burns terms "bodytalk."
The idea of order and unity in Mandeville's Travels
(1984) MacDaniel, Elizabeth J.; Chance, Jane; Doughtie, Edward; Nelson, Deborah
Mandeville's Travels, a fourteenth century work said by some critics to be wholly fictional, by others to be partially fictional, has defied scholarly attempts at definition and at placement within a genre. I do not intend to make such an attempt, to define Mandeville's Travels as a romance or moral treatise, for example, but rather will examine and explicate the text. It is my contention that Mandeville's belief in an order and unity that can simultaneously encompass and transcend disorder and diversity was the organizational and thematic principle upon which he created the work. I will provide a socio-historical context for the work, for I believe that the idea of Mandeville's Travels grew from a reaction to socio-historical events and changes within Mandeville's world. Mandeville's plan was to demonstrate the existence of order and unity despite the apparent disorder and diversity of the author's time. The text, then, is an exemplum of Mandeville's vision of the underlying unity and order in the universe, and, with an examination of the text, I prove that this idea governs the unified structure, the choice of formal techniques (such as juxtaposition, links across space and time, and repetition of images, among others), and the development of the theme of order underlying diversity.
The Sibylline voices of Christine de Pizan
(2007) Weinstein, Jessica R.; Chance, Jane
The Sibyl's importance as an authorizing figure in Christine de Pizan's oeuvre is widely acknowledged but universally under-estimated. Scholars have focused almost exclusively on Christine's use of the detached and serenely wise Cumaean Sibyl, notably in the Chemin de lonc estude and the Epistre Othea, and on close allegorized equivalents. This is to overlook the protean, cross-pollinating diversity of Christine's sibylline sources, and the variety and scope of their influence upon her writings. Here Christine's use of sibylline characters, themes, and authority will be scrutinized in texts that exemplify radical departures from the tropes generally recognized by scholars. They show selective reshapings of polymorphous classical and medieval tradition to meet the shifting contingencies of Christine's career as a writer. Explicitly, Sibyls are invoked as authorizing precedents for her self-fashioning as a woman of wisdom and foresight in political, social, moral, and theological matters; but implicitly, sibylline attributes are also incorporated in other characters and authorial voices. Furthermore, Christine draws from the full panorama of source traditions, embodying not only wisdom and foresight but also recklessness and regret; not only serenity but also frenzy and tears; not only detachment but also polemical engagement in national destiny. In her attack on courtly love, the Livre du duc des vrais amans , sibylline typologies underlie not only the unimpeachable Dame Sebille but also the transgressive Lady, whose fate evokes that of entrapped, shamed, or regretful Sibyls seen in Ovidian and later traditions. In the Epistre a la reine and the Lamentation sur les maux de la France, Christine evokes classical sibylline frenzy; calls upon the example of famous prophets who were ignored but ultimately vindicated; and she links foresight and maternal tears in an appeal to the queen, Isabel of Bavaria, to intercede as France's mother. In the Queen's Manuscript Epistre Othea, Christine pursues similar goals as sibylline tutor to Isabel and the dauphin. In the Ditie de Jehanne d'Arc , Christine addresses national crisis by inscribing Charles VII, Jehanne, and herself in a millennial prophecy of the End of Days, assuming the voice of an Apocalyptic Sibyl of judgment and divine revelation.
Translation as conversion, or making the Phoenix "male": Christianity and gender in the Old English "Phoenix" and its source
(1995) Ausman, Deborah J.; Chance, Jane
The Old English poem The Phoenix and its fourth century source, De Carmen de Ave Phoenice, have traditionally been read together as allegories on Christian resurrection. I read these poems against each other to show how they engage tantalizing debates about gender distinction, which raged in phoenix mythological commentaries and within the Christian church during the first millennium ACE. I consider the Old English poem not merely a translation of the Carmen, but a conversion. First, the Old English author "converts" a predominantly pagan poem, which, I posit, may be linked to the Egyptian cult goddess, Isis, into a resurrection allegory, placed squarely within the Germanic mythos. But more importantly, the Old English author makes the text "male," converting a text that offers the possibility of a world without gender categories into a text that not only preserves gender categories, but appropriates "female" reproductive power into a male, homosocial sphere.

Browsing by Author "Chance, Jane"

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