Browse Items (16459 total)

The use of magic was exploitative and morally ambiguous; however, with the thirteenth-century rise of universities, attitudes shifted: through natural magic and great learning, one could harness natural powers. The "highly intellectual" FranT…

Considers PardPT in light of Augustinian semiotic theory. Focus on the body in the Pardoner's materials signals the need to attend to the objects of signs, and the quarrel with the Host "renders impotent" the Pardoner's nominalist "attack on…

Camargo details how the Pardoner "pointedly rejects every tenet" of moral instruction found in chapter 1 of Waleys's "De modo componendi sermones" and shows how the treatise discloses flaws in the Pardoner's rhetorical techniques. The Pardoner "may…

Middleton reads the Pardoner materials as Chaucer's "formal and ideational" tribute to Langland's "Piers Plowman"--an embodiment of his appreciation of Langland's struggles with poetic self-representation, the gendered status of the poet, and the…

Comments on brief selections from a translation of PardT as evidence that Chaucer accepts the validity of the True Cross even though he rejects the Pardoner's "fraudulent" practice. Discusses how John Calvin "took the matter several steps further"…

Compares what PardT and Erasmus's "Pilgrimage of Pure Devotion" reveal about the "locatability" and placelessness of the Church, exclusion from Church locations, and disgust associated with such exclusion.

Both PrP and PrT express "affective devotional piety," while simultaneously they are "swollen with reference to targets of Wycliffite polemic." As a result, their Marian generic affiliations and the "collocational patterns" of their diction can and…

Delany explores the "imbrication" of life and art in PrT and the expulsion of Jews from France in 1394. She gauges Chaucer's contact with Jews and describes the conditions under which Jews lived in fourteenth-century France, specifically the results…

PrT depicts "the production and exigencies of wonder" in concert with the ambiguity and inscrutability of the miraculous. The abbot reestablishes the distinction between the animate and the inanimate by removing the mysterious "greyn," which does not…

Raybin compares the work by the Indonesian novelist Pramoedya Ananta Toer with ClT. Both works involve a powerful man who marries a poor girl and who eventually dismisses her. Pramoedya pays careful attention to the heroine's thoughts and feelings,…

Comments on the concern with propagating robust and pure lineages in numerous areas of medieval culture--including Chaucer's ClT, KnT, and MerT in particular. The denouement of the latter may be read as May's inserting herself into January's family…

Explores the nature and constitutive motifs of obscenity in the twelfth-century "Lidia," Boccaccio's "Decameron" 7.9, MerT, and the fifteenth-century "Cent nouvelles nouvelles."

Studies the development of mercantile practice in the late Middle Ages and depictions of merchants in English literature, from early satires to greater acceptability. Includes sections on merchants in Langland's "Piers Plowman," Gower's "Mirour de…

Explores a "gendered model of disability" in MerT, where the carnivalesque grotesqueness of May's performed pregnancy replaces January's blindness and impotence as a kind of disability.

Bedford explores the development of the term "irony" and interpretive issues surrounding its use, focusing on Chaucer's use of irony as reflected in Milton's interpretations of SqT.

Canacee's kindness toward the formel eagle shows Chaucer's sympathy for women and appreciation of female friendship. The formel, like other females in Chaucer, has been abused by men--and warns Canacee against them. In creating a painted mew for the…

Dorigen in FranT has more than the two options of shame or death: she can also choose to break a bad law, even though the decision to let bad law stand "seems somehow, tragically, to have been taken long before the characters became conscious of…

From a feminist perspective, Fernández Rodríguez compares FranT and ClT with Fanny Burney's "The Wanderer" (1814) and Maria Edgeworth's "The Modern Griselda" (1805). Dorigen's and Griselda's domestic constraints contrast the ones depicted by…

Mruk mines details and perspectives in the Wife of Bath materials to imagine the Wife as a real patient undergoing therapy.

Suggests that the "Loathly Lady" is an anthropomorphic representation of the land, linking human vagaries with the uncertain product of working any given land and underscoring the impossibility of human attempts to control and regulate the natural…

Sayers reviews commentary on the Wife of Bath's deafness; suggests that we treat it more literally than metaphorically; and posits that, through the deafened Wife, Chaucer "does not resolve the opposition between experience and authority, but rather…

Both Jerome and Chaucer follow Paul in deploying "provocative women" to dramatize contemporary controversies over who may interpret scripture. The Wife of Bath performs exegesis even as she effectively likens her husbands to "exegetes whose sins…

Surveys and assesses the manuscript glosses and notes to WBP, arguing that scribal commentary affirms the Wife's orthodoxy as an exegete. The glosses and notes in Oxford, New College 314 (Ne), and related manuscripts grant authority to her uses of…

Through its "metafictional dialogue" between the teller and pilgrim narrator; its "inter-illumination" of genres, including anticlerical satire, oath making, and fabliau; and its depiction of a "carnival hell," FrT parodies and thus undermines the…

Epstein argues for a nuanced understanding of money in SumT, reading its significations in light of the thirteenth-century Franciscan treatise "Sacrum commercium," medieval commercial practice, and deliberations on quality and quantity among the…