Browse Items (16376 total)

Argues that "Desire-as-impasse is the human condition" in KnT, exploring how readers' "reading backward" from the end of the tale--seeking to fulfill the "desire for signification"--parallels the efforts of Arcite and Palamon to articulate their own…

Twenty-six chapters by various authors, with an Introduction by the editor in which she emphasizes diverse theoretical approaches to Middle English studies and observes that Chaucer's texts "foreground the idea that readers construct texts" (3).…

Distinguishes between modern views of rocks as mere objects and medieval understanding of their "virtues," agency, and exemplary value, raising questions about objects in nature and in art. Assesses the tale of the cock and the rock in Robert…

A popular history of the George Inn, Southwark, located next to where the Tabard once stood. Includes various references to the Tabard Inn in history and in CT, and includes a chapter called "The Poet's Tale, Or, How English Literature Was Born in a…

Describes aspects of Chaucer's life that indicate that he had training in law or familiarity with it, and explores the legal language and details of GP, arguing that the Host's "responsibility for the pilgrims reflects the law of innkeeper's…

Discusses inquisition and "examination in the ecclesiastical courts" for the ways that they, like confession, help to disclose the development of interiority as an aspect of medieval selfhood, discussing literary works such as "Dives and Pauper,"…

Includes lyrics from a portion of Ros (lines 1–7, 15), translated into Modern English by Forrest Hainline.

Surveys literary depictions of economic ideals and economic abuses among the aristocracy in ParsT; Form Age; Wynnere and Wastoure"; "Piers Plowman"; and works by Gower, Hoccleve, and Lydgate, focusing on the "portrayal of lords and rulers, both as…

Includes discussion of the influence of Chaucer's Purse and Thomas Hoccleve's "La male regle" on Thomas Nashe's "Pierce Penilesse," examining the elements of comedy and "moral uncertainty" in Chaucer's poem and its "accretion of polygeneric…

Exemplifies how metrical phonology ("the linguistic forms that fill out metre") supports A. S. G. Edwards's claim (in "Chaucer and 'Adam Scriveyn,' " MÆ 81 [2002]) that Chaucer may not have written the lyric Adam. In line 3, "longe" and "lokkes"…

Argues that the monastic ideal of "contemplative solitude" was an innovative resource in English literature between Richard Rolle and Robert Henryson. Maintains that Chaucer deployed it comically in HF and that, along with notions of Chaucer's…

Investigates two "networks of meaning" within which to view late medieval English lyrics: the relationships among lyrics in manuscript collections (using "network mapping software") and the relationships between embedded lyrics and "narrative events"…

Includes comments on Cassandra, Persephone, and Philomela as victims of "acquaintance rape" in Chaucer's works (TC, MerT, and LGW), treating his and other versions (classical, medieval, and modern) as adaptations of myths that create "metanarratives…

Describes the "role Troy played in medieval literary imagination" as a foundation myth, and explores how the "destinies of some of the major figures" in TC are "inextricably" interwoven with that of Troy. Includes an abstract in English and in…

Examines the medieval conception of sight (both as sense and as ingress of the seen to the soul) in TC and Malory.

Explores the permeable boundary between waking and sleep, sensation and dream, in Dante's "Commedia," TC, and Machaut's "Fontaine amoureuse." each sleep-scene drawing on Ovidian tales of transformation. Comments on Chaucer's adaptation in HF of…

Examines marginal annotations in the surviving manuscripts of TC with the purpose of exploring both the reception of the poem and the role of the scribes in its textual transmission. The marginalia are analyzed not only from a textual, thematic,…

Asserts that Chaucer's inset lyrics in TC and LGW have a "tactical" quality that gives them flexibility and contingency. In TC, Antigone's song, using both English practices and French and Italian sources, demonstrates "a tension between negotiation…

Considers the concept of "manhod" (3.428) in TC in relation to critical discussions of Troilus's masculinity, reading Troilus's emotions in light of late medieval literary and social conventions and arguing that Chaucer's experiment in emotion is…

Argues that the "Roman de la Rose" "initiates a literary tradition that understands reason to be in tension with and even antithetical to imaginative writing," examining in this light works by Chaucer (TC), Gower, Lydgate, and Hoccleve, exploring in…

Translates TC into modern English rhyme royal stanzas, with footnotes and occasional marginal glosses. The introduction (by Christine Chism, pp. vi-xxx) addresses the social contexts of the poem; anachronisms; Chaucer's audience; the frontispiece…

Explores Chaucer's idea of "gossip" in TC (and elsewhere), especially as it relates to literature and Criseyde's reputation, examining more extensively Henryson's emphasis on malice rather than idle speech and its relationship with "literary…

Traces "the creative potentials of technologies of memory in the rise of English lyric poetry," focusing on Chaucer and Thomas Wyatt, and including assessment of how "innovations of lyric form are introduced" in TC "at moments in which memory is most…

Contrasts the unequivocal hermeneutics of "eating a book"--i.e., internalizing the text of the Bible and its "one true meaning"--as depicted in the illustration of the Cloisters Apocalypse (Metropolitan Museum of Art, Cloisters Collection, MS 68.174)…

Includes discussion of Sorrow in Rom, treating the poem as one that maps "an imaginative space in which to represent (and perhaps also elicit) emotion, one that interweaves emotional with embodied, sensory experience," and one that may "reflect the…