| Abstract | Paper -a:
I propose that Chaucer's dream-poem, House of Fame, affords a compelling vision of late medieval divine voluntarism and its effects on reality, language, and cognition. By highlighting the radical contingency operative within his parody of the Johannine Apocalypse, I explore Chaucer's figurative manifestations of controversial theological positions, e.g. that divine ideas are merely singular existents and that God arbitrarily determines salvation and reprobation. I also suggest that Chaucer's text transmitted the Bakhtinian 'authoritative discourse', translating its concepts into the popular idiom through poetic figuration.
Paper -b:
Despite abundant scholarship and criticism on dream poetry and religious vision, medieval writers' descriptions of the transition between normal consciousness and dream or vision, and the implications of those descriptions, have received surprisingly little attention. By analysing the images and the oneiric terms employed by Chaucer this paper examines these and considers implications both for ideas about consciousness and for relationships between religious and secular vision.
Paper -c:
Current discussions of the history and science of emotion are characterized by deeply entrenched debates: proponents of the cognitive approach, for example, consider emotions to be appraisals or evaluative responses to perception, in opposition to proponents of the materialist approach, who argue that emotions are constituted by autonomic physiological responses. This paper will explore connections between current and medieval theories of emotion in the 14th-century dream-vision poem Pearl. In this text, the experience of grief is both cognitive and physical, and is a catalyst for an internal progress toward knowledge; emotional experience and expression are tied equally to metaphors of transformation and journey. The emotional journey represented here thus raises a broader and intriguing question: what can medieval literature contribute to current debates on the emotions?
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