The Language of Prayer in Middle English,1200-1400 (Medieval, Religious, Katherine Group, Chaucer).
- Author/Editor
- Tarvers, Josephine Koster.
- Title
- The Language of Prayer in Middle English,1200-1400 (Medieval, Religious, Katherine Group, Chaucer).
- Published
- Tarvers, Josephine Koster. The Language of Prayer in Middle English,1200-1400 (Medieval, Religious, Katherine Group, Chaucer). Ph.D. Dissertation. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1985. DAI-A 46.11. Fully accessible via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global.
- Review
- Tarvers studies prayer in Middle English literature, analyzing "about 200 published Middle English prayers" and "21 hitherto-unpublished prayers from Bodleian manuscripts (which are presented in appendices). The analysis identified nine components commonly found in prayers (formulae of address, two kinds of honorifics, professions of faith, petitions, grounds for petitions, interpolated amplification, homiletic elements, and closing formulae) and the various forms each component takes." Then Tarvers "goes on to examine historically the treatment of these components in Middle English pious and didactic collections, such as "The South English Legendary," "The Lay Folks' Mass Book," "The Pricke of Conscience," and the Vernon MS. The examination brought to light three generally identifiable styles: a plain one; a second strikingly characterized by repetition, which I call "iterative,? and a third which I call "elaborate," because the writer appears to be conscious of style and the result is mannered. The examination revealed that prayers tend to become more iterative and elaborate as the fourteenth century progresses. But the progression is not a steady one: there is a peak of stylistic elaboration in the prayers embodied in the "Katherine group" to which subsequent prayers rarely attain. The last part of my study, which is of prayers in literary works, including the romances and the works of the "Pearl-poet," Langland, Gower, and Chaucer, produced two unexpected results. The prayers in these works proved to have the same components [as] those composed primarily for devotion and differed only in one structural particular, the occasional interruption of the prayer by the narrator to relate it to the narrative situation. Otherwise, what distinguished the prayers in the literary works was, effectively, a superior command of style in those writers" (n.p.). Tarvers (pp. 177-82) comments on stylistic features of eight prayers in Gower's Confessio Amantis: the narrator’s early address to Venus, Amans’ prayer to Genius, Nabuchadnezzer’s prayer to God, a prayer at the end of Iphis and Araxarathen, two prayers in Jason and Medea, one in Philomena, and the narrators’ rhyme-royal prayer to Cupid and Venus near the end of the poem.
- Date
- 1985
- Gower Subjects
- Confessio Amantis
Style, Rhetoric, and Versification
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations