Author Description

"This study of the House of Fame is the product of a long-time fascination with the poem. The thought of Chaucer having newly returned from several trips to Italy and engaging with the writings of Dante and Boccaccio for the first time, offered an exciting window onto late medieval English literary culture at a moment of profound change. He, and they, newly took up the vernacular against conventional wisdom as the medium to explore philosophical, aesthetic, and theological questions. By reading the House of Fame only as a Dantean poem, many readers have done it a disservice and missed much of the poem's important dialogue with Boccaccio; he left many legacies for Chaucer, the most important of which was a vernacular model for departing from Dantean poetics. Boccaccio also foregrounded a poetics of mural ekphrasis. Chaucer eagerly adopts this, but also fills the House of Fame with a striking concentration of three-dimensional visual images, some evoking the religious statuary of his own time, and some the theme of Apocalypse then popular. Since for the later medieval layperson and cleric, visual literacy often took precedence over literacy of the written word, it is important that we read poetic texts in the context of images. In the House of Fame Chaucer begins to present his own vision (however unfinished) as commensurate with Dante's or even Boccaccio's; the poem has much to tell us about his early acquaintance with the Italian poets and his restless struggle to understand and visualize fame, even on their terms. It is a poem always on the move, always in the process of its own "makyng," flaws and all. We must take it as it is, but we must also see it as a "work in progress," a rich and fascinating record of Chaucer's discovery of new intellectual horizons in the years after his sojourns in Italy."--