Much of the once most famous renaissance poetry was written by the Cavalier Poets, though most of it is not read today. These were the poets whose motto was Carpe Diem and who epitomize the swashbuckling, devil may care attitude we tend to attribute to the renaissance to this day. What this sometimes obscures is that their poetry is actually enormously subtle, elegant and rich.

Shakespeare's sonnets are comparatively neglected today but they are what Shakespeare himself thought would be his lasting legacy.  We look at a few representative sonnets to discuss how they reflect upon Shakespeare's Elizabethan worldview while also playing with the conventions of the Italian Renaissance.

Dr. Masson and Dr. Friesen delve further into this fascinating play on the topics of evil, death and human agency.

In this episode, Drs. Scott Masson and Bill Friesen explore one of the most iconic plays in western history: Hamlet. This Shakespearean tragedy has been considered by many famous authors to be the greatest play ever written. 

Geoffrey Chaucer is often considered the 'father of English literature.'  He is best known for his Canterbury Tales.  He was also the first writer to be buried in what has since come to be called Poets' Corner, in Westminster Abbey.    But Chaucer was very much a Renaissance man, even before the Renaissance came to England. He gained fame as a philosopher (and as a translator of Boethius) and astronomer, composing the scientific A Treatise on the Astrolabe for his 10-year-old son Lewis.   He maintained a career in the civil service as a bureaucrat, courtier, diplomat, and member of parliament.  Our podcast will discuss this fascinating figure and also one of his Canterbury Tales.

In our final installment on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight we move on from discussing the symbolism of number to discussing the symbolism entailed in the 3 beasts that Gawain encounters.  The author's artful use of parallelism leads to many interesting talking points throughout the episode

In our second of three podcasts on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, we explore a wide variety of issues ranging from the appearance of the Green Knight; to the significance of the pentangle on Gawain's shield; to the identity and nature of the two ladies that greet Sir Gawain when he appears in the court on his way to receive his dint from the Green Knight.

We return to our series after a lengthy COVID-induced hiatus looking at the medieval Romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.  In this first of two episodes we do a great deal of establishing the context of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

In today's episode, we begin by looking at cosmology and the medieval  synthesis of science with Christian truth in Dante's Divine Comedy. We  do so by looking at some pictorial representations of Dante's cosmology  in order to be able to visualize Dante's integration of small and, to  the modern mind, discrete fields of knowledge. We make it clear that  this must be understood allegorically.  We conclude this episode by discussing that it is love that moves what  appears in the visual portrait to be a static thing. Love is the  organizing principle of the whole of the Divine Comedy, and Primal Love,  Dante explains, is what organizes the various layers of Dante's  portrait of Hell. It is the perversion of God's charitable love  (charity) that results in variations of lust (cupidity), which are  thereafter justly punished in Hell.

This week's episode begins a series of episodes on the extraordinary  work composed at the outset of the fourteenth century by the great  Italian poet Dante Alighieri.  With his Christian understanding of the  soul, Dante's epic poem is an imaginative and moral vision of this  earthly life in the light of what will happen after death.  

The narrative takes as its literal subject the state of souls after  death and presents an image of divine justice meted out as due  punishment or reward, and describes Dante's travels through Hell,  Purgatory, and Paradise or Heaven, while allegorically the poem  represents the soul's journey towards God, beginning with the  recognition and rejection of sin (Inferno), followed by the penitent  Christian life (Purgatorio), which is then followed by the soul's ascent  to God (Paradiso).   

The first episode is a general overview of the verbal architecture of  the poem, looking at some of the many extraordinarily well-wrought  poetics and its basic motifs.  As a humanist, we will emphasize how  different Dante's theological and philosophical premises are from a poet  who believes that poetry is first and foremost a mode of  self-expression rather than an engagement with ultimate reality.