Includes bibliographical references (pages 215-234) and index.
Contents:
Introduction -- 1. For the Time Being: Interpretive Consolation in Augustinian Time -- 2. 'Quanto minorem consideras': Abelard's Proportional Consolation -- 3. Three Figures of the Church: Piers Plowman and the Quest for Consolation -- 4. Augustine and Arthur: The Stanzaic Morte and the Comforts of Elegy -- 5. Chaucer's Knight's Tale: Consolations at War -- 6. The Tower and the Turks: More's Meditative Consolation -- Conclusion.
Summary:
"This book is the first scholarship to map in detail the shape, origins, and rhetorical function of a narrative form authors in the medieval period learned from Augustine's two great histories: the personal Confessions and the political and ecclesiastical City of God. The form's simple and flexible shape - prospect, fulfillment, interpretive retrospect - derives from Augustine's Christian exegetical practice. Because its meaning resides in retrospective and open interpretation of a climactic center, the form emerges as a consolatory narrative alternative to the closures of Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy in key medieval texts manifesting personal, political, and ecclesiastical crisis: Peter Abelard's History of My Calamities, William Langland's Piers Plowman, the anonymous Stanzaic Morte, Geoffrey Chaucer's Knight's Tale, and Thomas More's Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation. "-- Provided by publisher. "This book explores how medieval writers provided consolation for personal stories that did not end well by telling those stories in terms of sacred history, which for them had not ended well yet. They knew how to do this because Augustine, in Confessions and City of God, did it first"-- Provided by publisher.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.