Chaucer's Parliament of Fowls and Refractions of a Veiled Venus in the Faerie Queene
Chaucer's Parliament of Fowls and Refractions of a Veiled Venus in the Faerie Queene
The Parliament is a text that bears unmistakably, crucially, and complexly on the Spenserian conception of eros and on the broader questions of the Renaissance poet's use of the past and particularly in the Middle Ages. A past form like the Parliament is revealed as a cultural constant but it is also resituated and revaluated, and in a paradoxical way it is both affirmed and denied, exposed and reinstated. Chaucer's garden of love in the Parliament is at once the approach to the Temple of Venus and the site to which the Dreamer returns to find the “noble goddesse Nature,” who is evident to him only after he has seen Venus herself. The Temple of the Venus in Spenser's fourth book draws a site in which Chaucer's Parliament of Fowls was in a refractive way that may not be appreciated.
Keywords: Chaucer, Parliament of Fowls, Venus, Spenser, The Faerie Queene, eros, garden of love
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