Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
This scholarly study approaches The Canterbury Tales from an extremely unusual perspective, from that of the corpse of its author. It widens to explore the relationship of the body, the text and image in medieval literature and in the mind of the reader. In the aftermath of Chaucer's death those who knew him and those who did not searched for his voice in his work as a form of resurrection. Later on the tomb itself was venerated while in the 19th century people had a need to authenticate the identity of its corpse. Prendergast also looks at the alternative point of view which separated a text's persona completely from the voice of the real body or poet. In the modern age, of course, we venerate Chaucer's other remains, his literature. This is a fascinating study about the different ways in which generations of readers have approached Chaucer.
Synopsis
In Chaucer's Dead Body, Thomas Prendergast looks at the material reasons behind Chaucer's transformation into a touchstone for the whole of the Anglophone Middle Ages. This book weaves an intricate argument about the ways that the body, death, and representation come together in the recuperation and reception of Chaucer over the centuries, and proposes a deeply compelling logic that links memorialization and canon formation. Making a persuasive and intriguing case that the status of Chaucer's physical body is an index of the status of Chaucer's work, and furthermore that there continues to be a link between corpse and corpus in all of our assertions of positive and negative literary values from Chaucer's time on, Prendergast organizes his study of Chaucer's literary legacy around Chaucer's tomb - around the history of attempts to restore it, to determine its authenticity, and to establish its exact location.