Chaucer's Ovidian arts of love

Abstract

More than any other poet in Chaucer's library, Ovid was concerned with the game of love. Chaucer learned his sexual poetics from Ovid, and his fascination with Ovidian love strategies is prominent in his own writing. This book is a full study of Ovid and focusing on love, desire and the gender-power struggles that Chaucer explores through Ovid. Michael Calabrese begins by recounting medieval biographical data on Ovid, indicating the breadth of Ovid's influence in the Middle Ages and the depth of Chaucer's knowledge of the Roman poet's life and work. He then examines two of Chaucer's most enduring and important works - Troilus and The Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale - in the light of Ovid's turbulent corpus, maintaining that both poems ask the same Ovidian question: What can language and game do for lovers? Calabrese concludes by examining Chaucer's views of himself as a writer and of the complex relations between writer, text and audience. Chaucer, like Ovid, saw himself as vulnerable to the misunderstanding and woe that can befall a maker of fictions, he writes. Like Ovid, Chaucer explores both the delights and also the dangers of being a 'servant of the servants of love' ...Now he must consider the personal, spiritual implications of being a verbal artist and love poet.

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