Literal Authority: The Exemplum and Its Traditions in Middle English Literature.
- Author/Editor
- Scanlon, Larry.
- Title
- Literal Authority: The Exemplum and Its Traditions in Middle English Literature.
- Published
- Scanlon, Larry. Literal Authority: The Exemplum and Its Traditions in Middle English Literature. Ph.D. Dissertation. The Johns Hopkins University, 1986. Dissertation Abstracts International A48.02. Abstract available via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global.
- Review
- "This study examines the role played by the exemplum in the emergence of the English literary tradition in the later Middle Ages, arguing that the mode provided a crucial vehicle for the assertion of secular moral authority. Part I traces the Christian expropriation of the exemplum from classical tradition, its development from an incidental rhetorical device to a discrete narrative genre. In The City of God Augustine focusses his challenge to classical notions of history with a revised exemplum whose doctrinal moral gives him greater rhetorical control over the historicity of the narrative. In the Dialogues, Gregory I generates from this doctrinal control an autonomous narrative genre, presenting the lives of Italian saints as exempla. The exemplum was an important vehicle for promoting Benedictine monasticism, for it made the sacred power of the saintly personality the direct result of the doctrinal precept it illustrates, reflecting the Benedictine emphasis on obedience to institutional authority. Part I concludes with an examination of the exemplum's efflorescence in the great preaching campaigns of the later Middle Ages. The sermon exemplum, like its monastic predecessor, used narrative to promote the Church's institutional prerogatives, but its audience was lay rather than clerical, and its structure made more distinct the gap between doctrinal moral and historical narrative. The remainder of the study traces the exemplum's secularization in Middle English literature. Part II examines Gower's attempt in the Confessio Amantis to ground the secular exemplum's moral authority in the ideal of kingship, which, in a revision of his principal antecedent, the Romance of the Rose, he proposed as a replacement for courtoisie as the central value of aristocratic life. Part III argues that Chaucer's use of the exemplum is structurally identical to Gower's, though he doesn't tie it to any specific political value. In the incompletion of the Monk's Tale and fabular resolution of the Nun's Priest's Tale he uses the mode to dramatize both the moral inadequacy of history and the inability of secular life to escape it. Part IV traces the attempts of Hoccleve and Lydgate to generate a positive affirmation of kingship without violating Chaucer's disjunction between morality and history." [Abstract shortened in ProQuest with permission of author].
- Date
- 1986
- Gower Subjects
- Confessio Amantis
Style, Rhetoric, and Versification