Once and Future Classroom 2.1 (2003): n.p. [Web publication]
No author listed; intended for pedagogical purposes. Summarizes the plots of several medieval narratives with garden settings, including MerT and FranT, exploring their versatility. Also comments on garden settings in J. R. R. Tolkien's "The Lord of…
Assesses depictions of the working class by Langland, Chaucer, Gower, and the chronicler Walsingham, considering what they disclose about conditions and attitudes at the time of the 1381 Uprising (Peasant's Revolt). Sharply criticizes Gower's and…
Lubinski, Jason D.
Open access Ph.D. dissertation (University of Oklahoma, 2019). Available at https://shareok.org/handle/11244/319600 (accessed February 8, 2023).
Analyzes "how medieval society understood the way gender characteristics were composed and balanced in a person by applying classical theories on biology, the humors, physiognomy, and astrology to medieval literary characters." Includes examination…
Lawler, Jennifer L.
Dissertation Abstracts International 57 (1997): 3012A.
A cross-generic study (excluding drama) of the effects of exile on such diverse characters as the Christian or the secular hero, the lover, and the pilgrim. Discusses works by Chaucer, Gower, and Langland.
Traces background of how Eve was understood by Christians in Antiquity and the Middle Ages in England. Explores portrayals of Eve by Augustine, Aquinas, Dante, and Chaucer, and other lesser-known authors. See Chapter 6, "Middle English Literature,"…
Sancéry, Arlette
André Crépin, ed. Angleterre et Orient au Moyen Age (Paris: Association des Médiévistes Anglicistes de l'Enseignement Supérieur, 2002.), pp. 51-64.
Ottomans and Saracens, people, whom Chaucer knew mainly through trade and crusade narratives, embody for him alterity in general and absolute determinism in contrast to Chrsitian free will. MLT suggests that these groups live in error, and while KnT…
Shaw, Patricia.
Purificacion Fernandez Nistal and Jose Ma Bravo Gazalo, eds. Proceedings of the VIth International Conference of the Spanish Society for Medieval English Language and Literature (Valladolid: Universidad de Valladolid, 1995), pp. 31-40.
Compares the roles and functions of Criseyde and the Wife of Bath as two of the most outstanding female characters in Middle English literature.
Owing to waning interest, the Chaucer Library, which had sought to present the works Chaucer knew, will cease following the publication of Boccaccio's "Teseida."
Suggests that Chaucer's TC influenced Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet" before serving as the source of the playwright's "Troilus and Cressida." Shakespeare explores ways to respond to source material in the two works. His "Troilus," in particular,…
Fleming, Martha (H.)
Julian N. Wasserman and Robert J. Blanch, eds. Chaucer in the Eighties (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1986), pp. 151-61.
Prologues are simply framing devices. WBT is not a device to explicate the Wife's character; it amplifies and creates variations on a theme in KnT.
Minnis, A. J.
Roy Eriksen, ed. Contexts of the Pre-Novel Narrative: The European Tradition (Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1994), pp. 153-83.
Chaucer's adjustments of his source materials in LGW produce narratives in which "Marriage, whether secured or desired, motivates and ennobles all the deaths for love." Experimenting with creating archetypically false men, Chaucer idealizes female…
Wollstadt, Lynn M.
S. Elizabeth Passmore and Susan Carter, eds. The English "Loathly Lady" Tales: Boundaries, Traditions, Motifs (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications, 2007), pp. 199-212.
Wollstadt explores similarities between WBT and the ballad "The Knight and the Shepherd's Daughter," considering the rape motif, concern with "authority and victimization," the possibility that the ballad was transmitted by female oral singers, and…
Ashley, Kathleen M.
Julian N. Wasserman and Lois Roney, eds. Sign, Sentence, Discourse: Language in Medieval Thought and Literature (Syracuse, N. Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1989), pp. 272-93.
From preaching tradition Chaucer borrowed the "topos" of renaming the sins "to make them seem more attractive to sinners," a "topos" that took two major forms: "a narrative "exemplum" about the Devil's unmarriageable daughters," and a "non-narrative…
Howard, Donald.
Robert S. Kinsman, ed. The Darker Vision of the Renaissance: Beyond the Fields of Reason (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), pp. 47-76.
Proposes that "purposeful" alienation that was characteristic of humanist thinking between the twelfth and seventeenth centuries: contempt for the world that belies an underlying fascination with it. Assesses the presence of the sentiment in several…
Sokolov, D. A.
Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2017.
Argues that the Petrarchism commonly held to have begun in English with Wyatt and Surrey is, instead, an alteration of a tradition already prevalent among English writers such as Chaucer, Gower, Hoccleve, and Lydgate. In particular, claims that…
Sokolov, Danila.
Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2018.
Chapter 2, "Chaucerian Melancholy in Renaissance England," explores how in "Astrophel and Stella" Sir Philip Sidney "reactivates: the melancholic and ambivalent "poetics of selfhood" of BD, as mediated in the "Petrarchan and anti-Petrarchan poetry"…
