Chaucerian Ekphrasis: Craft, Intertext, Dispence

Abstract: Ekphrasis has long been a topic of interest to literary scholars, but until quite recently medieval ekphrasis has existed on the periphery of most accounts of it. This article explores the distinctive nature of medieval ekphrasis in passages of description in the Middle English poetry of Geoffrey Chaucer. It argues that Middle English poetry was underpinned by a poetics of craft which made later ekphrastic theorisations, especially the concept of the 'paragone'—the confrontation of the arts, especially poetry and painting—problematic. It argues that Chaucer uses ekphrasis as a type of intertextual visualisation, a way of recognising, acknowledging, but also adapting and reworking intertextual materials. Lastly, it argues that Chaucerian ekphrasis worked to foreground the socio-economics of cultural production. By placing Chaucer's ekphrasis in comparison with a near contemporary passage of satirical ekphrastic description in the alliterative tradition, it becomes clear that Chaucer's ekphrasis works to emphasise the centrality of patronage in the creation of both visual and verbal art.