Browse Items (16377 total)

Assesses the general or "public" familiarity with Dante and his works in British culture, acknowledging his impact on poets such as Chaucer, Milton, and T. S. Eliot, but exploring instead a more pervasive presence. Includes references to Chaucer's…

Addresses Chaucer's works as part of a larger examination of the influence of Ovid's "Metamorphoses," particularly his employment of ekphrasis--the use of poetry to
portray other types of art.

Approaches Chaucer's works briefly through contrast with :"Piers Plowman," which is treated here as the key text in a tradition of literature defined by "a distinctive poetics of enigma." Observes that Chaucer explores horizontally across the earthly…

Includes Th and a selection from MerT in the section called "Backgrounds and Context."

Addresses the "bifurcation of philosophy and theology intervening between Dante and Chaucer," arguing that Chaucer "never demonstrated any confidence that poetry could in any way represent the reality of the divine." Assesses the "empiricism" of LGW,…

Studies the works of Thomas Walsingham for their importance in the field of late fourteenth-century English "public classical literature," helping to define this field by focusing on nuances in Walsingham's treatments of political events in…

Examines CT and Gower's "Confessio Amantis" as part of an imaginative reaction to the political circumstances following the Second Barons' War, arriving at a new role in "speaking to and for" the Henrician community.

Argues that ClT, using "distinctively Gowerian terms" such as "corage" and "visage," is Chaucer's response to Gower's perceived challenge at the conclusion of the "Confessio Amantis" for Chaucer "to drop his well-known political reticence and take a…

Argues that "alone of the three 'fathers of English poesy [Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate],' Gower openly grapples with an acute awareness of the cultural centrality of a concept that extends from a betrayal of love's intimacy to social, political, and…

Finds "ideas of mortality, the end of life, and the end of storytelling . . . closely linked" in Gower's "Confessio Amantis." Argues that the work leads the narrator, the poet, and the audience to a conclusion in which all "can share in his hope of…

Collects sixteen essays from the Third International Congress of the John Gower Society and divides into three groups: Part 1, "Knowing the Self and Others"; Part 2, "The Essence of Strangers"; Part 3, "Social Ethics, Ethical Poetics." The collection…

Examines the ways in which Gower and Chaucer use their source material differently. Gower uses Ovid to emphasize morality while Chaucer uses Ovid to explore both the courtly and the romantic.

Addresses connections between Boccaccio's "Decameron" and CT, with particular focus on ShT, MilT, and WBT. Presents a "hermeneutic argument" that explores areas including "alchemy, domestic spaces, economic history, folklore, Irish/English politics,…

Argues that Aristotelian theories of matter, form, and substance interact with medieval poetics, particularly in such works as ManT, SqT, "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," and those of Hoccleve and Metham.

Discusses the two marginal dragons found in the Ellesmere manuscript of CT, arguing that, like dragons in bestiaries and iconography, they "symbolize the marvelous," but in addition they also "prompt readers to attend to the marvelous aspects of…

Explores scribal errors in copying and comprehending details regarding classical characters and classical allusions in poetry, and how poets' phrasing implies awareness of those risks and seeks to mitigate them. These problems in transmission reveal…

Establishes that scribes are less likely than otherwise to introduce their own spellings of words that occur in initial position in verse lines, exploring why in psycholinguistic terms, and suggesting several implications for manuscript study. The…

Considers literary completeness, its relations to philosophies of perfection, and "the ways in which incompleteness is a special characteristic of Middle English literature," particularly in manuscript studies. Surveys kinds of incompleteness in CT,…

Explores the "compositional choices" made in the compilation of the texts included in San Marino, Huntington Library, MS HM 114, and maintains that TC (among others) was copied early and incorporated into this larger collection in response to a…

Examines the treatment of books as physical objects in the works of Chaucer, Gower, and Hoccleve, suggesting that this treatment may create a way of perceiving the text on the part of the reader.

Focuses on how manuscript compilations, especially biblical materials, are evoked in CT. Argues that a strictly historical arpproach to this material is inadequate and examines how an author can use the material form of books for specific literary…

Explores the "various degrees of control" exerted by medieval vernacular poets over the production of their manuscripts, maintaining that evidence from the Hengwrt and Ellesmere manuscripts indicates Chaucer "was clearly not moving expeditiously…

Focuses on aspects of the cultural situations of the medieval book. Examines elements of bibliography, social context, linguistics, archeology, and conservation within a broader view of the theory and praxis of manuscript study. For an essay that…

Claims that line 11 is not parenthetical and that "so" is an adverb of degree, in "They sleep all night with their eyes open, nature pricks them so in their hearts." In line 176, "the space" means "in the meantime," and not the object of "held." As…

A collection of essays on the production, reception, and editing of medieval English manuscripts. For an essay on Chaucer, search for Pursuing Middle English Manuscripts and Their Texts under Alternative Title