God's Ear: The Confessor in the Theology, Art, and Literature of the Late Middle Ages.
- Author/Editor
- Fanale, James Francis.
- Title
- God's Ear: The Confessor in the Theology, Art, and Literature of the Late Middle Ages.
- Published
- Fanale, James Francis. God's Ear: The Confessor in the Theology, Art, and Literature of the Late Middle Ages. Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, 1987. iii, 300 pp. Dissertation Abstracts International A48.02 (1987): 387. Fully accessible via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global.
- Review
- In his dissertation, Fanale studies the functions of confessors and confessor figures in late medieval English literature: Gower's "Confessio Amantis," "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," and Chaucer's "Parson's Tale," "Book of the Duchess," and Prologue to the "Legend of Good Women," with attention to aesthetic backgrounds in the "Roman de la Rose" and late-medieval art, and theological backgrounds in penitential legislation, handbooks, sermons, and liturgies. His treatment of Gower (pp. 211-27) attends to background to the figures of Genius and Venus, structural similarities between the CA and "the post-Lateran IV style of confessing" (216), Venus and Genius as "co-confessors for Amans" (220), and Amans' "imperfect contrition" (226). [MA]
- Date
- 1987
- Gower Subjects
- Confessio Amantis
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations