Past Event

Students and Faculty welcome. Reception to Follow.

Title: “The Canterbury Tales as a Danse Macabre”

My remarks concern the well-known medieval allegory of homo viator—that in life we are wayfarers, travelers, pilgrims. Chaucer’s “nine and twenty” travelers on their way to Canterbury are discussed in exactly these terms in the “General Prologue” and throughout. But there is something more in play here which I will tease out to show you exactly what Chaucer wants us to see—whether subliminally or, indeed, he might actually be putting all his cards on the table, up front, by framing his tales with this pilgrimage to Canterbury. This something more is the traditional Dance of Death that Chaucer uses as his parallel model for unfolding his tales. Through this generic lens, key and partially submerged aspects of the tales begin to take on a coherence that otherwise might be missed.

William Engel is Nick B. Williams Professor of English at the University of the South in Sewanee. He is the author of five books: four on literary history, Mapping Mortality (U of Massachusetts P, 1995), Death and Drama (Oxford, 2002), Chiastic Designs (Ashgate, 2009), Early Modern Poetics in Melville and Poe (Ashgate, 2012); and one on teaching and learning, Education & Anarchy (University Press of America, 2001). He also co-edited The Memory Arts in Renaissance England: A Critical Anthology (Cambridge, 2016).