Consolation in Medieval Narrative ― Augustinian Authority and Open Form

This book is the first scholarship to map in detail the shape, origins, and rhetorical function of a narrative form authors in the medieval period learned from Augustine's two great histories: the personal Confessions and the political and ecclesiastical City of God. The form's simple and flexible shape - prospect, fulfillment, interpretive retrospect - derives from Augustine's Christian exegetical practice. Because its meaning resides in retrospective and open interpretation of a climactic center, the form emerges as a consolatory narrative alternative to the closures of Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy in key medieval texts manifesting personal, political, and ecclesiastical crisis: Peter Abelard's History of My Calamities, William Langland's Piers Plowman, the anonymous Stanzaic Morte, Geoffrey Chaucer's Knight's Tale, and Thomas More's Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation.

Chad D. Schrock is an Assistant Professor of English at Lee University, USA. He specializes in early British literature and has articles published on subjects ranging from Chaucer to Beowulf.