Chaucer's House of Fame: The Poetics of Skeptical Fideism

On its original publication this classic title made sense of a difficult poem for the first time and brought that poem to the center of a concern with the nature of tradition, textuality, and language that is current today.  The book forces late-medieval philosophy out of the closet and into a relation with literature, and it validates the use of contemporary methods and sensibility in literary criticism.  In Sheila Delany's view, House of Fame portrays the ambiguity of old or new communication, with skeptical fideism as the means of transcending ambiguity.

On its original publication this classic title made sense of a difficult poem for the first time and brought that poem to the center of a concern with the nature of tradition, textuality, and language that is current today.  The book forces late-medieval philosophy out of the closet and into a relation with literature, and it validates the use of contemporary methods and sensibility in literary criticism.  In Sheila Delany's view, House of Fame portrays the ambiguity of old or new communication, with skeptical fideism as the means of transcending ambiguity.
 

Sheila Delany is professor of English at Simon Fraser University.  She is the author of many articles and books, including most recently The Naked Text:  Chaucer's  Legend of Good Women and A Legend of Holy Women, a translation of a fifteenth-century legendary by Osbern Bokenham.