| Abstract | Paper -a:
The wealth of significance embedded in Chaucer's Troilus is confirmed by the abundance of scholarship it has triggered. However, the relationship between fictional characters and the act of poetry composition has been largely overlooked. By analysing Troilus's progress towards knowledge, this paper argues that the characters are closely connected with the inner structure of the work. It explores how they represent Chaucer's reflection on the act of composing poetry. It illustrates how Troilus's structure impacts on Chaucer's later writings whilst retaining devices typical of his early dream visions.
Paper -b:
This paper aims to provide another perspective on Chaucer's Miller's Tale. Through this perspective, which points toward gnostically-inclined overtones, my paper presents a different type of justice in an eschatologically different world. The sarcasm and irony with which Chaucer infers certain biblical allusions is hard to ignore, and the final outcome of this otherwise humoristic tale is also difficult to explain in traditional terms. A close reading of the text seems to reveal a paralleling system, which places the old tradition, embodied by the character of John, in a position of acute spiritual poverty and thus, in sharp contrast with the new and enlightened ways of Nicholas and Alison. The post-lapsarian John is bound by his encroaching ignorance and is thus heading for a second fall, whereas Nicholas and Alison come to appear as a new and improved Adam and Eve, awaiting their second paradise.
Paper -c:
As Richard Kieckhefer once noticed, the holy and the unholy were interlocking phenomena in medieval culture. Such perspective on religion and magic may indeed be seen in Historia Tartarorum, attributed either to Benedict the Pole, a member of the 1245 papal mission to Mongols led by John of Pian di Carpine, or to the scribe, 'C. de Bridia'. Perhaps Benedict (if we assume that he authored the relation) projected his Christian perception of magic as connected with religion onto the Tartar world he experienced. His interest in the Mongol reality makes him the first Polish orientalist, while Chaucer's orientalism, understood rather as fascination with the Orient, led to the exoticization of Tartary in The Squire's Tale. The tale also mentions the question of Mongol religion, only to proceed to a discussion of their magic, but the magic there is no longer 'unholy', as opposed to 'the holy', but technological, manmade, and unnatural. The texts portray two stages in the medieval approach to magic, which were followed by the Renaissance condemnation of magic as heretical.
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