Browse Items (16397 total)

Discusses Wordsworth's modernization of ManT, which was commissioned for Thomas Powell's "The Poems of Geoffrey Chaucer Moderniz'd" (1841) but eventually suppressed by Wordsworth's wife.

Unlike their biblical source, Chaucer's and Gower's allusions to Jephthah's daughter indicate concern with pain and emotional suffering. Also considers the illustration in Pierpont Morgan Library, MS M.126 that accompanies Gower's tale of Virginia in…

Argues that PhyT not only addresses changes in the medieval social power structure, but also serves as a "critique of masculine power" within the medieval European court system.

The already diffuse mixture of accepted sources for FranT is complemented here with an argument favoring a debt to French fabliaux.

Offers Richard de Fournival's "Consaus d'amours," a thirteenth-century French "art d'aimer" (art of love), as a possible source for FranT.

Interrogates post-Enlightenment understandings of shame, and argues that in FranT shame negotiates continua rather than dichotomies (men/women, courtly love/marriage, and public/private). Read in light of conduct literature, Arveragus's claims and…

Argues that genre and the discourses of desire in MerT prove too strong for the narrator, who is constantly conflicted about his presentation not only of linguistic and narrative desires but also of the psychoanalytic displacements of these desires.

Presents a version of the Griselda story from Thomas III, Marquis of Saluzzo (c. 1355-1416) in "Le chevalier errant," and analyzes how fourteenth-century audiences would have reacted to Chaucer's version in ClT. Includes a translation of Thomas's…

References to animals presented as "sentient beings" in SumT convey the friar's "spiritual weakness," perhaps reflecting oral traditions of Franciscan ideals.

The language and imagery of demonic temptation versus human free will connect FrT and SumT and gain dimension by comparison with ClT. Thomas of SumT is called "demonyak," but his scatological riposte to the friar is justified anger.

Two Anglo-Latin "celibacy poems" use "quoniam" to mean the same thing that it means in WBP, prompting the question, might a "joke have been circulating among thirteenth and fourteenth century clerics, that every "quare" has its 'quoniam'?"

Compares the resolutions of conflict in WBT and Gower's "Tale of Florent" and explores their methods of characterization. While Chaucer depicts characters through dialogue, argument, debate, and negotiation with other persons, Gower's characters…

Explores Chaucer's strategy of satire in WBPT, arguing that in its concern with interpretation and discursive insensibility it is fundamentally similar to the anti-mercantile satire of MerT, ShT, and MLT. Reads the Wife in "a London context,"…

Explores relations between concepts of selfhood and notions of spiritual and, especially, secular vocation in WBT, Langland's "Piers Plowman," and Gower's "Vox clamantis." The "wide scope" of late medieval applications of the Pauline notion of being…

"Arthur and Gorlagon" and WBPT share numerous misogynist topoi as well as the plot element of a mission to understand women. The Latin romance is thus "a more significant analogue for the combined Prologue and Tale . . . than has been recognized."

Assesses the relations between universality and particularity as epistemological modes in MLT, exploring allegory and individuality, realism and nominalism, and generalization and specification in the characterization of Custance and how she is…

Considers how the "professional identity" of the teller informs concerns with justice in MLT. Engagement with mercantile law, common law, natural law, divine intervention, and the "limitations of human justice" pervade MLPT and indicate an uncertain…

Interprets Custance's use of "Latyn corrupt" to the natives of Northumbria in terms of Isidore of Seville's discussion of linguistic history and suggests that MLT takes an acutely historicist view of the development of medieval Christianity,…

In MLT, Custance's first husband is the "Sowdan of Surrye," and in "Macbeth" the witches plot to scourge a shipmaster who is "to Aleppo gone." That both texts treat Syria and the northern reaches of Great Britain as complementary zones, in space as…

Analyzes John Fletcher's and William Shakespeare's collaboration on "The Two Noble Kinsmen," an interpretation of KnT, and offers how "The Two Noble Kinsmen" represents a "meditation . . . of the vernacular literary canon," as it allegorizes the…

Explicates comparisons between lovers and animals in KnT, suggesting that Chaucer uses them to expose human folly.

In "Turning the Other Cheek: Scatology and Its Discontents in The Miller's Tale and The Summoner's Tale," pp. 12-59, Smith uses farting in MilT and SumT to explore Chaucer's complex and refined "scatological rhetoric," a trope that has been obscured…

Examines how Lydgate's "Legend of Dan Joos" recasts the opening of GP into a representation of eternal redemption in praise of Mary in his own aureate style.

Chapter 5 focuses on comic uses of brutality in CT, particularly in MilT and KnT. Also addresses how Chaucer refers to torture in MLT, but rejects excessive brutality in PrT.

Analyzes how Chaucer's rhetorical constructions decenter self-disclosure and resist simplistic notions of gender in WBPT, ClT, FranT, and PhyT. Figurative or allusive speech cannot adequately represent subjectivity and desire. Chaucer's treatments of…