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This article argues that in the first two Canterbury Tales Geoffrey Chaucer employs music as a literary aesthetic for the sake of structural and narrative development. The music theory, forms, images, and performance practices in <i>The Knightâs Tale</i> and <i>The Millerâs Tale</i> constitute a literary aesthetic of <i>musica</i> that extends far beyond the more common and limited idea of music as simply song or sounded melody or harmony. In medieval texts on music theory, written almost exclusively in Latin, the term <i>musica</i> refers to performance as well as to theory, philosophy, and principlesâall features that function in sounded music as well as in other artistic forms, such as literature. This is not to imply that a given literary passage necessarily mentions singing or musical instruments or would have originally been sung or set to musical accompaniment. Instead, an aesthetic of <i>musica</i> constitutes a literary use of music to shape a textâs structure and guide its interpretation, even in the absence of notated or sounded music. This aesthetic function of music contributes to the structural and narrative elements of the discursive interaction between <i>The Knightâs Tale</i> and <i>The Millerâs Tale</i>, which have often been compared, but not yet in terms of their music.
Studies in Philology – University of North Carolina Press
Published: Nov 12, 2015
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