Wednesday, April 14, 2010

God's Patients: Suffering and the Divine in the "Canterbury Tales" by John Bugbee

This dissertation reads “The Clerk’s Tale,” “The Man of Law’s Tale,” “The Franklin’s Tale” and “The Physician’s Tale” against the 12th century writings of Bernard of Clairvaux. Especially relevant are the relative moral worth of passive and active behaviors and the types of oaths and laws that must be followed in order to live a moral life. After an introductory chapter on methods, the dissertation gives close readings of the tales before applying Bernard. I think the strengths of this book are the attentive readings, the easy to follow style of the prose, the interdisciplinary approach that reads literature in dialogue with philosophy and theology, and the clear juxtapositions of Chaucer and Bernard. I would have liked to have seen the thesis (which actually ends up claiming that Chaucer has a clear ethical agenda, at least on the question of obedience to God’s will) stated in the introduction instead of in the conclusion, and I think the dissertation wasn’t as fully engaged in a modern critical conversation as it might have been (there’s an interlude that deals specifically with one critic and an appendix that treats another one, but the real meat of the analysis within the dissertation focuses on the philosophy and the stories).

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