Between The Purple Passages


by Ashley Zimunya


  • About
  • Prose and Poetry
  • The Stage and Beyond
  • Faith and Culture
  • Book ReviewsReviews
  • Past Essays
  • Understandings of The World, Matter, & Relations Between the Human and Non-Human in Medieval and Post-Modern Literature

    The Fall Medieval Christian society understood the Fall as an upheaval of God’s intended design for creation as it brought about a reconfiguration of humans’ relationship to their surroundings, creating a world in which humans now needed to kill animals for food and clothing. The Fall was also understood as… Continue reading

    Faith and Culture, Past Essays
    De Proprietatibus Rerum, Genesis, Geoffrey Chaucer, Isidore of Seville, John of Trevisa, On The Properties of Things, The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville
  • “Harlotrye” and “Moralitee”: Sexual (& Other) Violence in Chaucer’s ‘The Miller’s Tale’ and ‘The Reeve’s Tale’

    Excluding ‘The Knight’s Tale’, the first fragment of The Canterbury Tales is characterised by “harlotrye” referring to crude jesting, not exclusively of a sexual nature as harlotry particularly means now. Chaucer represents harlotry as the antithesis of morality, or “virtuous conduct and thought” as in the ‘Miller’s Prologue‘ Chaucer the… Continue reading

    Past Essays, Prose and Poetry
    Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, The Miller’s Tale, The Reeve’s Tale
  • Close Reading: Opening of ‘The Miller’s Tale’, Geoffrey Chaucer

    This carpenter hadde wedded newe a wyf Which that he loved more than his lyf;Of eightene yeer she was of age.Jalous he was, and heeld hire narwe in cage,For she was wilde and yong, and he was oldAnd demed himself ben lyk a cokewold.He knew nat Catoun, for his wit… Continue reading

    Past Essays, Prose and Poetry
    Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, The Miller’s Tale
  • Translation as Metamorphosis in Geoffrey Chaucer and John Gower’s Versions of Ovid’s Metamorphoses

    The primary meaning of the verb translate is ‘To convert or render (a word, a work, an author, a language, etc.) into another language’. Thus, a translation is often understood as a (usually completed) work resembling that from which it is translated, often with the only difference between source and… Continue reading

    Past Essays, Prose and Poetry
    Classical Literature, Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, Medieval Literature, Mythology, Ovid, Translation

About

If your hobbies also include reading, thinking excessively about everything you read, and learning other people’s thoughts on the things they’ve read recently or a long time ago, you’re very welcome here!

This is where you can find my observations on various texts (a text here being anything that can be ‘read’ and thus including film, theatre, or Taylor Swift lyrics, for example) and what I think can be found between their “purple passages”.

Recent Posts

  • Review: The Lost Bookshop by Evie Woods (One More Chapter, division of HarperCollins, 2023)
  • Review: If Beale Street Could Talk by James Baldwin (Dial Press, 1974)
  • ‘Thou art a Roman, be not barbarous’: Civilisation & Barbarism in Titus Andronicus and Othello
  • ‘An Act of Love’: The Representation of Bodily Autonomy and Free Choice in Octavia Butler’s ‘Bloodchild’
  • Foreigners and Foreignness in Love’s Labour’s Lost and The Dutch Church Libel (1593)

Recent Posts

  • Review: The Lost Bookshop by Evie Woods (One More Chapter, division of HarperCollins, 2023)
  • Review: If Beale Street Could Talk by James Baldwin (Dial Press, 1974)
  • ‘Thou art a Roman, be not barbarous’: Civilisation & Barbarism in Titus Andronicus and Othello

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