Nebuchadnezzar's Children: Conventions of Madness in Middle English Literature.
- Author/Editor
- Doob, Penelope B. R.
- Title
- Nebuchadnezzar's Children: Conventions of Madness in Middle English Literature.
- Published
- Doob, Penelope B. R. Nebuchadnezzar's Children: Conventions of Madness in Middle English Literature. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1974.
- Review
- In this study Doob aims to provide a "representative late medieval view of madness and its conventions," describing classical and biblical roots, and the emphases found in later commentaries and representations. She identifies moral, medical, and psychological aspects of late-medieval literary madness, and a fundamental alignment of madness with sin. In the taxonomy that structures the book, Doob offers a set of three general character types--conventions" as she calls them throughout--separating the Mad Sinner (madness as punishment) from the Unholy Wild Man (madness as purgation) and the Holy Wild Man (madness as test or proving) and using them to classify and discuss a wide variety of literary characters--Lucifer and Herod to Sir Gowther and Sir Orfeo--drawn from various literary genres: saints' lives, romance, drama, etc. She concludes with an anomalous (as she admits) discussion of Thomas Hoccleve as a poet unusually concerned with madness, perhaps because he experienced madness himself--a possibility that Doob raises but leaves unresolved. The biblical Nebuchadnezzar merits his place in the title of this study by being, Doob tells us, the "prototype of literary madness" (58) in all its medieval forms. In a section that examines various adaptations of the story of Nebuchadnezzar's madness, anchored in the Book of Daniel, Doob assesses Gower's version from "Confessio Amantis" 1.2785-3042, admiring its "pathos" (86) and other romance elements that make it "one of the most moving" tales in CA. She clearly prefers it to the version of Chaucer's Monk ("pardonable only if . . . seen as an attempt to fit tale to teller" [p.81]) and pairs it with the version found in "Cleanness" as two effective treatments of the bestialized mad king as a moral exemplar. In this study Doob addresses neither Gower's retelling of Nebuchadnezzar's dream in CA, nor other renderings of madness not affiliated with Nebuchadnezzar in his works, such as the bestialization of the peasants in VC, the madness of love (CA, Book 1,130), the grief-stricken madness of Apollonius (CA VIII, 1687), and others. [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.2]
- Date
- 1974
- Gower Subjects
- Confessio Amantis