Less than a decade separates two of the grandest literary masterworks of the Italian Trecento: Dante's Divine Comedy and Petrarch's Canzoniere. And yet a yawning aesthetic chasm that divides them.
All tagged Poetry
Arthurian Journeys: Lancelot and Sir Gawain
Characters in the great medieval poems are markedly lacking in psychological nuance, to be sure. Yet to say that the medieval author was indifferent to the inner journeys of his characters is to be mistaken - as we shall see in the tales of Sir Gawain and Lancelot.
Piers Ploughman & Medieval Christian Morality
The fourteenth-century allegorical poem by William Langland is pegged, by most scholars, as a fierce indictment against ecclesiastical corruption - and that indeed it surely is. But heed must be paid to not endow the work with humanistic and liberal connotations it doesn’t possess.
Tales of Courtly Love: Marie de France's Lais
The Lais of twelfth-century poetess Marie de France may depict grand and, to modern minds, exaggerated romantic gestures, but grandiloquent as they can be, Marie’s short tales of courtly romance provide some surprisingly profound insights into the nature of love.