Sacred Texts: Legends and Sagas

The Canterbury Tales and Other Works of Chaucer (Middle E...

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"The House of Fame" is a Middle English dream vision poem by Geoffrey Chaucer, written in the 14th century, belonging to the tradition of allegorical dream poetry (alongside works like "The Parliament of Fowls" and influenced by Dante and Ovid). The poem opens with an extended meditation on the nature and causes of dreams — whether they arise from bodily humors, illness, emotional obsession, or genuine prophetic revelation — before the narrator describes falling asleep on December 10th and finding himself inside a glass temple of Venus. The temple's walls depict the story of Aeneas at length, following his escape from Troy, his affair with Dido, and his abandonment of her to sail for Italy. Chaucer's treatment of the Dido episode is notably pointed: he interrupts the Virgilian narrative to deliver a sharp feminist-inflected commentary on male deception, warning women that men who appear virtuous often prove false once they've gotten what they want. The excerpt ends with Dido's lament and suicide, directing readers to Virgil's *Aeneid* or Ovid's *Heroides* for the full account — a characteristic Chaucerian move of deferring to sources while having already made his own interpretive mark. The surviving excerpt establishes the poem's blend of learned classical material, comic self-deprecation, and moral skepticism toward romantic idealism.

The Canterbury Tales and Other Works of Chaucer (Middle E...

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