Chaucerian Belief: The Poetics of Reverence and Delight Book

In this book John Martti Hill views focuses on what he believes is Chaucer's organizing purpose in his writings: the exploration of truth in human experience and fictions. Through readings of many of the "Canterbury Tales" and all of Fragment 7, Hill demonstrates the deep-seated faith that always accompanies Chaucer's skepticism and shows the major place that belief and feeling have in his scale of values. According to Hill, Chaucer is committed to affective cognition - what we know, through the salience of our emotions, about anything not fully open to reason or to immediate experience. In Hill's analysis, Chaucer's pilgrim tellers, who interpret and react to their tales, take on a more dynamic role than has recently been accorded them by other critics. These tellers try to appropriate their tales, given their understanding of them, but to some extent each tale resists that appropriation. For Chaucer, fictions are bearers of both truth and falsehood. We must assess fictions cautiously, knowing that what they teach us about such issues as love, justice, order, and mercy can be either clarified or warped by our feelings and our individual subjectivity.Read More