Browse Items (16378 total)

Reads PrT and its concern with usury in light of medieval architectural construction and its dependence upon financing through lending, arguing that although the Tale demonizes Jewish lenders and exalts Christians through associations with,…

Compares several late-medieval boy-murder narratives to assess attitudes toward Jews before and after their 1290 expulsion from England. Chaucer's PrT is the "finest aesthetic treatment" of the story in the Middle Ages and, in comparison with other…

Considers "shared speech" to be a theme and a device in PrPT, focusing on apostrophe, prayer, Christian devotion, and anti-Semitic sentiment as means to and expressions of rhetorical community. Describes the place of apostrophe in medieval rhetorical…

Maintains that the silence of the pilgrims at the end of PrT signifies the Prioress's effectiveness in delivering a story of pathos that stuns the audience into silence. Explores how Chaucer uses PrT "to promote cautious, critical analysis" as a…

Explains palindromes and palindromic structures, rooted in classical and exegetical traditions, here exemplified by means of Augustine of Dacia's couplet. Then argues that PardT "features palinodromically arranged characters, settings, and words that…

Uses details of the Pardoner's description in the GP and his interactions with other pilgrims to support the hypothesis that Chaucer depicts him as a castrato and satirize an aspect of corruption in the medieval Church.

Considers the Physician's misreading and misapplication of his source material (the Sermon on the Mount and Jean de Meun) to be key to proper understanding that he is "untrustworthy" and that PhyT reveals his lack of "spiritual sensitivity." Reads…

Explores issues of absence, death, exile, silence, orality, and musical performance in "Sir Orfeo" to find connections with FranT. Approaches "Sir Orfeo" as a reflection on how Chaucer depicts the professional art and artists and lay-makers in FranT.

Argues that the narrator and the characters of FranT pursue an ideal of social harmony based on "trouthe," but they produce a "collective fiction" in which "competing forms of exchange"--marriage, promises, and money--disclose tensions that must…

Connects the complicated relationship among FranT's three main characters and the political relationship of England, France, and Brittany. Asserts that each character symbolizes one of these places and shows how the dynamics of love and sex merge…

Explores the functions and implications of the black rocks in FranT both as a symbol of universal evil and as a narrative device, arguing that the rocks have particularly rich and pervasive significations, anticipating the postmodern device of a…

Regards the Squire as the "son-substitute" of the Franklin, and reads FranT, with a nod to Freud, as a projection of the narrator's idealized and decontextualized attitudes toward money, generosity, gentility, and virtue that reveals a subtle…

Argues that Edmund Spenser's adaptations of SqT and "Amis and Amiloun" in Book IV of "The Faerie Queene" "[embody] his theory of friendship," both in the relations and interactions among the characters and in the ways that he asserts his own place in…

Explores the medieval concept of "mounted knighthood" in "conception and practice," considering how it resonates with "postmodern models of the cyborg, distributed consciousness and the inherently prosthetic self." Assesses "chivalry's intersections…

Contends that the SqT explores "rhetorical imitation" as a means to confront the postlapsarian "fallen" nature of language, "multiplying the rhetorical conventions 'imitatio,' inexpressibility, and 'translatio'" in order to "probe the idea of poetic…

Interprets the biblical allusions and references in MerT as Chaucer's invitation to his audience to "consider the ethics of appropriating morally authoritative texts." The narrator, January, and May manipulate textual authority in various ways,…

Modernizes MerPT in iambic pentameter couplets, with brief notes and facing-page text in Middle English. The introduction (pp. vii-xv) emphasizes the bitter tone of the tale and its satire

Comments on the role and status of women in the fabliau genre, and argues that May of MerT and Alisoun of MilT are "women of resistance . . . concerned with regaining partial control over their own bodies through adultery." The two characters produce…

Assesses January's praise-of-marriage speech (encomium) as a "classical' thesis' as it appeared in the later Middle Ages." The speech engages the WBP through common source material and follows the topic and structuring of the thesis genre found in…

Considers the "politics of translation" in ClT, arguing that the tale is primarily concerned with how Walter "draws out the willing submission of his subjects," manifest in the "analogical relation between Walter and Griselda as the translator and…

Examines two poems on the figure of Griselda by Eleanora Louisa Hervey (1811–1903). The first, published in 1850, and apparently intended for children as well as adults, emphasizes the cruelty of the system that enables husbands to exercise total…

Traces the role of the verbs "mot-," "shul," "oughte," and "willen" in defining the relations and motivations of Walter and Griselda, to demonstrate how "the contextualization of the linguistic construction of identity relative to the individual's…

Considers the protagonists of ClT and Lars von Trier's film "Breaking the Waves," exploring how the audience's experiences of the "weird realism" of Griselda and Bess may be seen to induce a "heightened mode of encounter with the traces of a…

Argues that reading "panne" at the end of FrT as clothing rather than cooking utensil closely links the Wife and her tale with that of the Friar. Connects the Friar's criticisms of the Wife and her desires with the depiction of the faithful widow…

Comments on the presence and treatments of friars in three Middle English writers, including discussion of Chaucer's depictions of friars and the Friar in CT and his uses of anti-mendicant literature as source material.