Davidoff, Judith M.
Rutherford, N.J.; Madison, Wis.; and Teaneck, N.J.:
Basing her work on a study of 189 poems, Davidoff analyzes common features of "framing fictions." With attention to Chaucer's sources and literary tradition, she offers readings of BD, demonstrating relationship of meaning to structure; of HF,…
Mann, Jill.
Elizabeth Archibald, Megan G. Leitch, and Corinne Saunders, eds. Romance Rewritten: The Evolution of Middle English Romance; A Tribute to Helen Cooper (Martlesham, D. S. Brewer, 2018), pp. 85-102.
Argues that various narrative and stylistic devices in KnT evoke the question "Does human life have a final meaning?" The poem begins with an ending and ends with a beginning, these complemented throughout by stoppings and startings and various…
Calabrese, Michael.
Tison Pugh and Marcia Smith Marzec,eds. Men and Masculinities in Chaucer's "Troilus and Criseyde" (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2008), pp. 161-82.
Focusing on failures of the male body depicted in the consummation scene of TC and in the autobiographical episode of the C-text, Calabrese compares Troilus of TC and Will of "Piers Plowman" as masculine questors in search of truth. Pandarus…
Reports on the author's completing a Ph.D. in medieval English and pursuing a career during the COVID-19 pandemic; includes comments on the "clear parallel" between teaching Chaucer's works and teaching online courses generally.
Although the concept of solitude is considered a Renaissance phenomenon, it occurs often in Chaucer's works as "alone" or "privity" and in the concept of private space, such as Nicholas's room in MilT. The "struggle for personal space" was an…
Nielsen, Melinda.
Studies in Philology 115 (2018): 25–49.
Clarifies that Boethius was a model for "medieval authors with political ambitions--and missteps--of their own." Imprisoned and accused of treason, Usk aligned himself in his "Testament" with Boethius, although his depiction of his own "seditious…
Salter, Elisabeth.
English: The Journal of the English Association 67 (2018): 163-80.
Shows how Chaucer's oeuvre offers many glimpses of readers' and listeners' encounters with the written word, but that last wills and testaments offer more direct insights into "the ways the majority of people interacted with and interpreted 'English'…
Rudd, Gillian.
In Greg Garrard, ed. The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 27-39.
Comments on forerunners of ecocritical thinking in medieval literature, and explores the connotations of "green" (often in contrast with "blue") in Wom Unc, SqT, FrT, WBT, and "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," arguing that medieval usage reflects a…
Breuer, Heidi.
Kathleen A. Bishop, ed. "The Canterbury Tales" Revisited--21st Century Interpretations (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2008), pp. 1-15.
Identifies several aspects of medieval legal discourse concerning rape and explores how they "inform the representation of rape" in RvT. Also assesses implications of modern resistance to recognizing the two rapes in RvT, viewing that resistance as…
Ross, Valerie A.
Chaucer Review 31 (1997): 339-56.
Both Criseyde's dream in Bk. 2 and Troilus's dream in Bk. 5 of TC are generally understood in terms that debase Criseyde. But Chaucer's intertextual construction of these dreams and his reconstruction of Cassandra and Criseyde from his sources…
Episode from a science fiction series about memory erasure and personality manipulation via futuristic technology. Several scenes set in a classroom and teacher's office with references to Chaucer and the Wife of Bath, including a brief reading from…
Haruta, Setsuko.
The Society for Chaucer Studies and Koichi Kano, eds. To the Days of Studying Medieval English Literature: Essays in Memory of Professor Tadahiro Ikegami (Tokyo: Eihosha, 2021), pp. 18-39.
Considers the characterizations of Helen and Criseyde in TC through multiple contexts, including estates of medieval women and the ways Helen is depicted in Greek literature.
Evans, Robert C.
English Literary Renaissance 19 (1989): 324-45.
Discuses the complex response to Chaucer in Jonson's annotations on his copy of Thomas Speght's 1602 edition of Chaucer, especially the affinity of ethical and poetic thought, concentrating on two poems, "The Remedie of Love" and "Of the Cuckow and…
Sigal, Gale.
Deborah M. Sinnreich-Levi and Gale Sigal, eds. Voices in Translation: The Authority of "Olde Bookes" in Medieval Literature (New York: AMS, 1992), pp. 191-205.
Through their dramatic rendering of the lovers' discrepant responses to the coming of dawn, the aubades in TC highlight the tempermental differences of the characters and prefigure their separate, though intertwined, fates.
Suggests that the "portraits" of Trojan war heroes and heroines in Benoit de Ste Maure's "Roman de Troie" are carefully individuated and arranged, and that Chaucer's "literary techniques" in the "sketches" of GP are similar to Benoit's in several…
Both Beowulf and Chaucer's Walter in ClT are "compulsive." Beowulf is obsessed with his heroic powers; Walter, with testing his wife. Walter is seen as a "monster," his treatment of his wife as inhuman.
Coghill, Nevill, and Norman Davis, readers.
[n.p.]: Spoken Arts, 1960s.
Item not seen. WorldCat records indicate that this spoken-word recording includes "Beowulf's speech to Hrothgar, the Dragon Flight and the Funeral of Beowulf" in Old English (20.02 min.) and GP and PardT in Middle English (29.16 min.).
Pope, John Collins, and Helge Kökeritz, readers.
New Haven, CT: Whitlock's, 1954.
Item not seen. WorldCat records indicate that these readings were released in LP recording and/or cassette tape recurrently by Whitlock's, Educational Audio Visual, and Lexington Records with slightly varied titles. The selections from Chaucer, read…
Fleming, John V.
Susan J. Ridyard, ed. Chivalry, Knighthood, and War in the Middle Ages (Sewanee, Tenn.: University of the South, 1999), pp. 137-50.
Details of the GP description of the Knight reflect the ascetic ideal of knighthood promoted by Bernard of Clairvaux in Liber ad milites templi. Chaucer's Knight is by no means a Templer, but the description harkens back to a related view, perhaps…
Plummer John F.
Robert G. Benson and Susan J. Ridyard, eds. New Readings of Chaucer's Poetry (Rochester, N.Y., and Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2003), pp. 107-18.
Plummer explores sexual references and innuendoes in the speeches of the Host, arguing that sexual and textual power are inseparable for the Host. The Parson's concern with spiritual productivity balances the Host's concern with physical generation,…
In HF, Aeneas is a "possible love-traitor," while in LGW the "condemnation" is much clearer. In the "Laud Troy Book," he is a political traitor who is never presented as the founder of Rome. Such depictions of Aeneas reflect how the "threat--or…
