Its fierce anti-Semitism notwithstanding, "Titus and Vespasian" is an important document of cultural uses of the "fall-of-Jerusalem narrative" and of attitudes toward Jews and Judaism in late medieval England. Thus, it deserves scholarly attention…
Dahood, Roger.
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 31 (2009): 125-40.
Dahood attributes several features of the plot of PrT to "non-Marian, historical English narratives of Jews crucifying English Christian boys" and explores how and when these features became attached to narratives of a chorister murdered by Jews. The…
Kolve, V. A.
Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2009.
Reprints six of Kolve's essays on visual imagery and iconography in Chaucer and medieval literature and adds two new ones--both on MerT: "Of Calendars and Cuckoldry (1): January and May in The Merchant's Tale" (pp. 93-122) and "Of Calendars and…
Benton, Andrea Gronstal.
Dissertation Abstracts International A69.09 (2009): n.p.
Benton contrasts SqT and the work of the "Gawain"-poet with popular romances as a way of understanding how romances employ descriptive passages as an essential "formal and conceptual" element.
Ingham, Patricia Clare.
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 31 (2009): 53-80.
Reads SqT as Chaucer's exploration of the "double-face of newness." Cambyuskan's encounter with the brass steed is counterpointed by Canacee's communication with the falcon, posing an ambiguous pairing of "creative rationality" and "enchanted…
Various concepts of "otherness" in SqT--oriental setting, magic, non-human speech, female centrality--reflect Chaucer's "reshaping" of Ovidian "transformation" myth. His efforts to enter "into feminized animal subjectivity . . . intertwine with…
Setting out to establish what medieval readers thought about romances and what they labeled romances, Furrow concentrates on a wide range of romances from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries. Her discussion of romance and truth includes analysis…
As knight, sheriff, and "contour" (I.359), the Franklin is the quintessential late medieval county "bureaucrat," whose duties provided incentives both to disclose and to hide the financial information to which he was privy. From its "dramatic irony"…
Jost, Jean [E.]
Albrecht Classen, ed. Words of Love and Love of Words in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2008), pp. 395-420.
Courtly literature is an intellectual battleground in which reversals of gender and social positions clash. The men's rhetorical competition in FranT shows a courtly love of words.
A study of works featuring the test-of-love motif argues for including FranT among them rather than among narratives employing the motif of the "maiden's rash promise." However, by devising a "test" for Dorigen's suitor that expresses her concern for…
Sayers, William.
Notes and Queries 254 (2009): 341-46.
Glossed in "The Riverside Chaucer" as "illusionists, magicians," tregetours cause their subjects to experience "a fall from cognitive certitude to amazement and bafflement," a result that is captured in the "associational field" that includes both…
By framing his "Pentacostal parody" within a parody of fourteenth-century English academics' preoccupation with measuring "both physical and metaphysical realities," Chaucer registers "a cautious but not gloomy attitude" regarding the spectrum of…
ClT and MLT dramatize contemporary uncertainties concerning the extent of a mother's genetic "influence" on her offspring, even as they critique the "fantasy of an autonomous male line." Given that disputes regarding monarchal succession formed the…
Ginsberg, Warren.
Andrew Galloway and R. F. Yeager, eds. Through a Classical Eye: Transcultural and Transhistorical Visions in Medieval English, Italian, and Latin Literature in Honour of Winthrop Wetherbee (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), pp. 145-64.
Ginsberg compares Dante's, Petrarch's, and Chaucer's descriptions of geography in their poems: Dante relied on the landscape of Italy to establish a geographical base; Petrarch allegorized Dante's geography; and Chaucer then "translated Petrarch's…
Hodges, Laura F.
Chaucer Review 44 (2009): 84-109.
Hodges "reads" Griselda's "sartorial transformation[s]" in light of detailed knowledge of fourteenth-century material culture. For instance, the fact that a smock could be made of plain linen or embroidered silk, or that it was the innermost of many…
Scala, Elizabeth.
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 31 (2009): 81-108.
In Lacanian terms, WBT and ClT reveal "what each speaker seems most desperate to deny." Ideas of sovereignty ("self-determination"), mastery ("control over another"), and the desires they help to constitute are parallel in the Tales. So are the…
Chaucer modifies his sources for ClT in a way that emphasizes Griselda's virtue as specifically "feminine" and exclusively "wifely." The reflections of her wifely virtue in the pagan wives of LGW, who "view devotion to their husbands as their highest…
Sidhu, Nicole Nolan.
Maryanne Kowaleski and P. J. P. Goldberg, eds. Medieval Domesticity: Home, Housing and Household in Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 177-208.
Adaptations of its sources shape ClT in ways that encourage male, bourgeois readers to imagine themselves as Griselda's protectors. Infused with a sense of moral and patriarchal responsibility and driven by religious devotion, such readers also…
Stillinger, Thomas C.
Andrew Galloway and R. F. Yeager, eds. Through a Classical Eye: Transcultural and Transhistorical Visions in Medieval English, Italian, and Latin Literature in Honour of Winthrop Wetherbee (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), pp. 223-38.
Observing that threshold between the Wife of Bath and the Clerk and between their tales, Stillinger explores how Chaucer stands at the "threshold between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance" (224): "If the Clerk imports the new science of the…
Yager, Susan.
Ann W. Astell and J. A. Jackson, eds. Levinas and Medieval Literature: The "Difficult Reading" of English and Rabbinic Texts (Pittsburgh, Penn.: Duquesne University Press, 2009), pp. 35-56.
Examines parallels between Levinas's writing and medieval allegory. Yager reads ClT in a Levinasian mode to generate an open-ended reading or "an exercise in ifs." ClT can be read as an ethical allegory; Chaucer, as an ethical allegorist. Yager…
Nolcken, Christina von.
Andrew Galloway and R. F. Yeager, eds. Through a Classical Eye: Transcultural and Transhistorical Visions in Medieval English, Italian, and Latin Literature in Honour of Winthrop Wetherbee (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), pp. 239-66.
Assesses the Miller in the historical context of clerical responsibilities and the Wycliffite translation of the Bible. MilT is comic, but its narrator is "deadly serious about furthering the cause of lay intellectualism and the Wycliffites'…
Scott, Anne.
Cynthia Kosso and Anne Scott, eds. The Nature and Function of Water, Baths, Bathing, and Hygiene from Antiquity Through the Renaissance (Boston: Brill, 2009), pp. 407-26.
Scott addresses use of water imagery in medieval narratives. In MilT, flood imagery affects all classes of society and provides a common experience through which the satire of each individual class can occur.
Walts, Dawn Simmons.
Chaucer Review 43 (2009): 400-413.
In MilT, Nicholas's real and reputed knowledge of astrology convinces John of the upcoming Flood, evidence that the clerk has spent his time well in learning the science of reckoning time. Indeed, in contrast to the carpenter, the educated clerk has…
