While covering all the major work produced by Geoffrey Chaucer in his pre-"Canterbury Tales" career, "Chaucer from Prentice to Poet" seeks to correct the traditional interpretations of these poems. Edward Condren provides new and provocative interpretations of the three "dream visions" - "Book of the Duchess", "Parliament of Fowls", and "House of Fame" - as well as Chaucer's early masterwork "Troilus and Criseyde".Condren draws an arresting series of portraits of Chaucer as glimpsed in his work: the fledgling poet seeking to master the artificial style of French love poetry; the passionate author attempting to rebut critics of his work; and, finally, the master of a naturalistic style entirely his own.This book is one of the few works written in the past century that reevaluates Chaucer's early poetry and the only one that examines the Dream Visions in conjunction with the Troilus. It should frame the discourse of Chaucer scholarship for many generations to come.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

Edward Condren examines the manuscript of the Gawain-Pearl Poet in the light of a compositional method well recognized from the literature of ancient Greece and Rome through the Renaissance but largely overlooked by modern criticism. Arguing that the manuscript is a single integrated artifact and not merely a collection, he shows that it is held together, as is the universe, by mathematical equations called the Divine Proportion in the Middle Ages and phi by modern mathematicians. More than a critical study of four poems in a manuscript, Condren's detailed discussion of numeric theory reveals the medieval way of understanding the created universe in neo-Pythagorean and Platonic terms, and it underscores the importance of the quadrivium in the medieval view of an ordered universe. Drawing on medieval theories of proportion and harmony, Condren shows that the manuscript is more intricately designed and presented than anyone has yet recognized and that the poet who created this work was better educated and more self-consciously brilliant than most have imagined. He argues that the order in which the poems appear - with the two poems set in the Middle Ages placed at the beginning and end of the manuscript and the two set in the Judaic era located at the manuscript's center - allows the literal narratives to exfoliate historically from the Old Testament world, through the era of the New Testament, and implicitly to the salvation that lies beyond. Working poem by poem, Condren details the mathematical forms governing the structure of the manuscript and guiding its progress, from the calculated use of decorated initials to sophisticated mathematics involving squares, primes, different counting systems, and geometrical schemes of the pentangle and ultimately the cross.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

Using extant manuscripts as his starting point, Edward Condren argues that the overall design of the ""Canterbury Tales"" has a structural parallel with Dante's ""Commedia"". He demonstrates how individual tales support this design and how the design itself confers rich meaning, in some instances investing with new complexity tales that otherwise have been little appreciated. Dividing its focus between the underlying unity of the poem as a whole and the discrete tales that create this unity, this book advances several interpretations: the progressive dislocation and displacement in Fragment One; a claim for the unity of the ""marriage group""; the survey of the poet's literary career in Fragment Seven; and the merging of Chaucer's professional and spiritual lives at the end of the poem.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• The Energy of Creation
• The Organization of the Canterbury Tales
• The First Fragment
• The Imperfect Knight and His Perfect Tale
• The Miller, the Reeve, the Cook
• The Man of Law's Tale
• Stability and the Language of Agreements
• Two Weavers from Bath
• Two Witty Glosses: Friar's Tale and Summoner's Tale
• Two Kinds of Agreement: Before God and Before Man
• Two Versions of Magic: Squire's Tale and Franklin's Tale
• From Flesh to Spirit
• Fragment VI: The Physician's Tale, The Pardoner, His Prologue, and His Tale
• Fragment VII: The Craft of Letters
• Fragments IX and X: Poetic Fruition/Spiritual Apotheosis
• The Chaucer Portrait at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Using extant manuscripts as his starting point, Edward Condren argues that the overall design of the ""Canterbury Tales"" has a structural parallel with Dante's ""Commedia"". He demonstrates how individual tales support this design and how the design itself confers rich meaning, in some instances investing with new complexity tales that otherwise have been little appreciated. Dividing its focus between the underlying unity of the poem as a whole and the discrete tales that create this unity, this book advances several interpretations: the progressive dislocation and displacement in Fragment One; a claim for the unity of the ""marriage group""; the survey of the poet's literary career in Fragment Seven; and the merging of Chaucer's professional and spiritual lives at the end of the poem.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)