Newman, Claire.
English Review (Deddington, Oxfordshire) 13.1 (2003): 2-5.
Summarizes performance features of WBP (echoes of preaching, animal imagery, range of emotion, entertainment value) appropriate to fourteenth-century encounters with the text as an aural experience.
Normandin argues that a "surplus of urine in the absence of fecal matter affects the tone" of WBP. Chaucer "associates the Wife of Bath with urine because antifeminist traditions often represented females as liquid, dripping creatures and because…
Risden explores how several medieval narratives "subvert" readers' expectations and "hint at the loneliness of the moral act." Includes comments on WBP, as well as on "Beowulf," "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," "Piers Plowman," and other works.
Parallels between Criseyde and the women of WBPT "interrogate the following issues: equality between the sexes, possessions (ownership), possession (jealousy), and appearance." Rosenfeld reads the loathly lady as a "synthesis" of the Wife of Bath…
Steiner, Wendy.
Rosemary Feal, ed. Profession 2008 (New York: Modern Language Association, 2008), pp. 24-32.
Personal narrative about Steiner's composition of an opera inspired by WBT, intended for production as a full-length animated film. Includes sketches and storyboards by John Kindness.
Argues that Chaucer's representation of the widow in FrT anticipates the "cursing hag" of Early Modern tradition, especially in responding to the summoner's refusal of her request for charity. The curse and the summoner's refusal to repent help to…
Nohara, Yasuhiro.
Journal of Human Sciences (Momoyama Gakuin University) 17.3 (1981): 33-69.
Line-by-line, phrase-by-phrase commentary on the grammar and lexicon of CkPT, presented as a series of notes to a reprinting of the text from F. N. Robinson's 1957 edition.
Aloni, Gila.
Danielle Buschinger and Arlette Sancery, eds. Mélanges de langue, littérature et civilisation offerts à André Crépin à l'occasion de son quatre-vingtième anniversaire (Amiens: Presses du Centre d'Études Médiévales, Université de Picardie-Jules Verne, 2008), pp. 1-10.
Explores how Chaucer's reflections on maternity expose a relationship between Christianity and other religions in MLT.
Allen, Valerie, and David Kirkham,eds.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1998.
Middle English text of WBPT and the GP description of the Wife of Bath, with notes, glossary, and discussion questions on facing pages. Includes commentary on Chaucer's life, contemporary social issues (including pilgrimage), and the rest of CT.…
Brandolino examines reciprocity between faith and interiority in a number of late medieval English vernacular texts, including WBPT and SNT. After 1215, when Pope Innocent III "issued a decree requiring all Christians . . . to make an annual private…
Cole, Meghan R.
Sigma Tau Delta Review 5 (2008): 17-25.
Cole examines the "intricate relationship between sex, money, and power" in WBP, particularly as reflected in the sequence in which the Wife recalls her husbands.
Contrasts WBT to popular romance narratives of the period, arguing that notions of "sentence"--i.e., of "meaning that is inscribed into a narrative by its author"--force high cultural glossing onto popular texts that may not be best suited to such…
Bromyard's denunciation of "popular views on sex" in the Luxuria section of his "Summa Predicantium" resonates verbally and structurally with WBP, suggesting that the Wife's performance functions in part as a counterattack to such sermonizing by …
Misaki, Noguchi.
Kaetsu University Research Review 50.2 (2007): 89-11.
Explores the semantic range of "hende" and of "sely" in MilT and examines efforts to translate the words in various modernizations, particularly those of the eighteenth century.
Facing-page version of MilPT and the GP description of the Miller, with modernization in iambic pentameter facing the Middle English text from the Riverside edition. Contains a descriptive introduction, brief notes (pp. 53-55), and a biographical…
Chaucer's audience would have considered the Miller's apparent lack of jealousy toward his wife in the context of a long-standing teaching that jealousy has a salutary side. According to that view, "[w]hoever is not jealous does not love."
Zilleruelo, Erica L.
Kathleen A. Bishop, ed. "The Canterbury Tales" Revisited--21st Century Interpretations (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2008), pp. 27-43.
Considers several features of MilT, including diction, arguing that MilT is a "Chaucerian fabliau."
Breuer, Heidi.
Kathleen A. Bishop, ed. "The Canterbury Tales" Revisited--21st Century Interpretations (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2008), pp. 1-15.
Identifies several aspects of medieval legal discourse concerning rape and explores how they "inform the representation of rape" in RvT. Also assesses implications of modern resistance to recognizing the two rapes in RvT, viewing that resistance as…
Analogous to orientalism, the "philologism" of RvT is rooted in "North-South binaries" that partake of and help to constitute southern condescension to northerners in England, even before the rise of a Standard Written Dialect. Informed by the…
Petrina, Alessandra.
Giovanni Iamartino, Maria Luisa Maggioni, and Roberta Facchinetti, eds. Thou sittest at another boke: English Studies in Honour of Domenico Pezzini (Milan: Polimetrica, 2008), pp. 223-35.
RvT differs from its sources and analogues by developing the relationship between sight, desire, and reason, ultimately questioning the function of vision, the most important of the senses.
Tolkien, J. R. R.
Tolkien Studies 5 (2008): 109-71.
Reprints Tolkien's assessment of the dialect features of RvT, originally presented to the Philological Society in Oxford (May 1931) and published in the Society's Transactions in 1934. This version is reprinted with attention to Tolkien's marginal…
Tolkien, J. R. R.
Tolkien Studies 5 (2008): 173-83.
Reprints the "rare pamphlet version" of Tolkien's lightly abbreviated performance version of RvT, adapted from Skeat's edition with diacritical marks to aid pronunciation and several adjustments to emphasize dialect features of the Tale. In his…
Wadiak, Walter Philip.
Dissertation Abstracts International A69.01 (2008): n.p.
Wadiak considers how Middle English romances focus on "giving and spending" as a questioning of the emergent capitalistic system, examining romances from "King Horn" through KnT and arguing that these works simultaneously shape and reflect the move…
