"Penolopëes Trouthe": Female Faithfulness in Late Medieval English Literature.
- Author/Editor
- Graham, April Michelle Adamson.
- Title
- "Penolopëes Trouthe": Female Faithfulness in Late Medieval English Literature.
- Published
- Graham, April Michelle Adamson. "Penolopëes Trouthe": Female Faithfulness in Late Medieval English Literature. Ph.D. Dissertation. Rutgers University, 2017. ix, 208 pp. Dissertation Abstracts International A79.08(E). Fully accessible via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global and at https://rucore.libraries.rutgers.edu/rutgers-lib/55484/.
- Review
- "This dissertation examines the figure of the faithful woman in late medieval English literature . . . . tak[ing] Penelope as its guiding figure for investigating how authors engaged with female faithfulness because, thanks to a distinctive medieval commentary tradition, she was taken by nearly all later medieval readers as a paragon of wifely faithfulness" (ii). Taking Penelope as paradigmatic, Graham examines various Chaucerian female protagonists, Mary Magdalene of the eponymous Digby play, and Gower's Penelope in his "Confessio Amantis" to show that "late medieval iterations of conservative-seeming “good women” stories turn out to contain seeds for challenging tradition and rethinking medieval readers’ relationship to the past" (iii). In particular, "Gower's Genius rewrites Penelope's letter from the 'Heroides' to reconceive literature as authorized and even made necessary by morality and experience" (ii).
- Date
- 2017
- Gower Subjects
- Confessio Amantis
Sources, Analogues, and LIterary Relations