This paper is a discussion of parallels between John Lydgate's Dance of Death and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.

Inaug.-diss.--Bern.

This dissertation challenges the standard view that fifteenth-century poets wrote irregular meters in artless imitation of Chaucer. On the contrary, I argue that Chaucer’s followers deliberately misread his meter in order to challenge his authority as a laureate. Rather than reproduce that meter, they reformed it, creating three distinct meters that vied for dominance in the first decades of the fifteenth century. In my analysis of 40,655 decasyllables written by poets other than Chaucer, I show that the fifteenth century was not the metrical wasteland so often depicted by editors and critics but an age of radical experimentation, nuance, and prosodic cunning. In Chapter One I present evidence against the two standard explanations for a fifteenth-century metrical collapse: cultural depression and linguistic instability. Chapter Two outlines an alternative framework to the statistical and linguistic methods that have come to dominate metrical studies. In their place I propose an interdisciplinary approach that combines the two techniques with cognitive science, using a reader-oriented, brain-based model of metrical competence to reframe irregular rhythms as problems that readers solve. Chapter Three applies this framework to Chaucer’s meter to show that the poets who inherited his long line exploited its soft structure in order to build competing meters; in that chapter I also argue that Chaucer did not write in iambic pentameter, as is generally assumed, but in a “footless” decasyllabic line modeled on the Italian endecasillibo. Chapter Four explores metrical reception; by probing scribal responses to Chaucer’s meter we can gain insight into how fifteenth-century readers heard it. Chapters Five through Seven investigate three specific acts of reception by poets: those of John Walton, Thomas Hoccleve, and John Lydgate. I conclude the dissertation by tracing the influence of Hoccleve and Lydgate on the later fifteenth-century poets George Ashby, Osbern Bokenham, and John Metham, and by identifying the eclipse of fifteenth-century meter with the Tudor poets Stephen Hawes and Alexander Barclay, who replaced a misreading of Chaucer’s meter with a misreading of Lydgate’s, inadvertently returning sixteenth-century poets to an alternating decasyllable reminiscent of Chaucer’s own meter. / text

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This study considers Thomas Hoccleve’s role, throughout his works, as a “religious” writer: as an individual who engages seriously with the dynamics of heresy and ecclesiastical reform, who contributes to traditions of vernacular devotional writing, and who raises the question of how Christianity manifests on personal as well as political levels – and in environments that are at once London-based, national, and international. The chapters focus, respectively, on the role of reading and moralization in the Series; the language of “vice and virtue” in the Epistle of Cupid; the moral version of Chaucer introduced in the Regiment of Princes; the construction of the Hoccleve persona in the Regiment; and the representation of the Eucharist throughout Hoccleve’s works. One main focus of the study is Hoccleve’s mediating influence in presenting a moral version of Chaucer in his Regiment. This study argues that Hoccleve’s Chaucer is not a pre-established artifact, but rather a Hocclevian invention, and it indicates the transnational literary, political, and religious contexts that align in Hoccleve’s presentation of his poetic predecessor. Rather than posit the Hoccleve-Chaucer relationship as one of Oedipal anxiety, as other critics have done, this study indicates the way in which Hoccleve’s Chaucer evolves in response to poetic anxiety not towards Chaucer himself, but rather towards an increasingly restrictive intellectual and ecclesiastical climate. This thesis contributes to the recently revitalized critical dialogue surrounding the role and function of fifteenth-century English literature, and the effect on poetry of heresy, the church’s response to heresy, and ecclesiastical reform both in England and in Europe. It also advances critical narratives regarding Hoccleve’s response to contemporary French poetry; the role of confession, sacramental discourse, and devotional images in Hoccleve’s work; and Hoccleve’s impact on literary tradition.