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Medieval Fictionality: Poetics, Emotion, and Chaucer

Talk

Professor Marion Turner, University of Oxford

This event has now finished.

Event date
Tuesday 29 April 2025, 5.30pm to 7pm
Location
In-person and online
Room K/133, King's Manor, Exhibition Square (Map)
Audience
Open to alumni, staff, students, the public
Admission
Free admission, booking required

Event details

Department of English and Related Literature Annual Riddy Lecture

In this lecture, Marion explores late-medieval understandings of what fiction was, and what fiction did. In the context of the reception of Aristotle in the later Middle Ages, she will tease out the relationship between poetry, rhetoric, and ethics. She compares classical literary theory with medieval literary theory, and draws on recent work on the history of the emotions, with a strong focus on the role of the reader. What was fiction defined against in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries? What were its powers in comparison to theology, or to rhetoric? Her literary examples will centre on Chaucer’s poetry, ranging widely across his oeuvre.


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This lecture will not be recorded and the Q&A will only be open to in-person attendees.

Image: St. Augustine in His Study, French (Artist), 1460, The Walters Art Museum, Creative Commons License.

Venue details

Wheelchair accessible