Reading Women in Late Medieval Europe : Anne of Bohemia and Chaucer's Female Audience
Reading Women in Late Medieval Europe : Anne of Bohemia and Chaucer's Female Audience
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Author(s): Thomas, Alfred
ISBN No.: 9781137544193
Pages: xvii, 251
Year: 201509
Format: Trade Cloth (Hard Cover)
Price: $ 75.89
Dispatch delay: Dispatched between 7 to 15 days
Status: Available

Geoffrey Chaucer has traditionally been seen as indebted to the great male writers of medieval Europe (Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarch and Guillaume de Machaut). However, little has been written about the European woman who was Queen of England and his possible patron: Anne of Bohemia, daughter of Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV and wife of Richard II. Although Chaucer explicitly compliments the Queen in his work, scholars have been reluctant or unable to engage seriously with the question of her role in Chaucer's oeuvre. This book shows that Anne came from a long line of highly educated and multilingual royal women, and that Chaucer would have been fully aware of the fact. Even if she did not literally commission any of his works, Chaucer seems to have been writing for Anne as an imagined reader; and this awareness surely shaped the way he wrote and what he chose to write. The book rereads some of the famous stories from the Canterbury Tales alongside contemporaneous works in Czech, German and Latin - languages with which the Queen was familiar - in order to provide a European context for Chaucer's desire to become a European - not just an English - writer.


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