Barootes, B. S. W.
In Jamie C. Fumo, ed. Chaucer's "Book of the Duchess": Contexts and Interpretations (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2018), pp. 29-50.
Considers the relations between BD and fourteenth-century devotional texts, particularly "Cursor mundi," that disparage "fable" as a form of idleness. Rejecting the popular association between consuming fiction and playing idle games, BD reclaims…
Steinberg, Glenn.
Theresa M. Krier, ed. Refiguring Chaucer in the Renaissance (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998), pp. 91-109.
Reads Spenser's "Daphnaida" as a "refiguration and response" to BD, modified by Spenser's Protestant outlook. Compares and contrasts the two poems, considering tone, idiom, and faith in the ability of art to console.
Lynch, Kathryn L.
Kathleen Coyne Kelly and Tison Pugh, eds. Chaucer on Screen: Absence, Presence, and Adapting the "Canterbury Tales" (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2016), pp. 130-48.
Interprets Pier Paolo Pasolini's "I racconti di Canterbury" as a "profound" engagement with CT, analyzing four instances of adaptation that reflect subtle appreciation and understanding of Chaucer's themes and techniques: a latrine scene at the…
Torabi, Katayoun.
Matthew Davis, Tamsyn Mahoney-Steel, and Ece Turnator, eds. Meeting the Medieval in a Digital World (Amsterdam: Arc Humanities, 2018), pp. 27-44.
Describes two projects that use digital research tools: one using Lexomics to compare passages in "Beowulf" and "Blickling Homily XVII" and another using Lexomics and Voyant to 1) examine verbal clusters in GP to "see if Chaucer wrote differently"…
Explores how Chaucer capitalized on extrinsic and intrinsic connotations in his ape metaphors. Kelly provides backgrounds to the metaphors from other medieval texts and, following Michael Riffaterre, theorizes about how such metaphors can operate in…
Croll, Angus.
San Francisco: No Starch Press, 2015.
A collection of playful JavaScript programs, imitating or responding to well-known literary authors--Hemingway, Shakespeare, Austin, Woolf, Borges, etc.--and including
brief descriptions of each writer's style. The section on Chaucer (pp. 104–11)…
Identifies the "Catholic Humanist rhetorical" ideal that combines "wit and wisdom" in Shakespeare's "As You Like It," examining ten individual scenes. Opens with background to this ideal in European humanism, especially Italian and English, including…
Sherwin, Michael S.
New Blackfriars 94 (2013): 456-74.
Compares the depictions and analyses of love in TC, Annie Dillard's "The Maytrees" (2007), Thomas Aquinas, and modern psychologies of love, arguing that their underlying concerns with conflicts between passions and choices indicate that sustained…
Promotional materials indicate that this essay analyzes a cryptic mystery of the encomium on marriage in MerT (1267ff.), considers previous critical studies, and discloses a new interpretation.
Boitani, Piero.
Francesco Bruni, ed. "Le Donne, i Cavalier, l'Arme, gli Amori": Poema e Romanzo, la Narrativa Lunga in Italia (Venice: Marsilio, 2001), pp. 71-83.
Describes the impact of Boccaccio's "Teseida" on Chaucer's works in Anel, PF, TC, and, especially, KnT, exploring Chaucer's adaptations, the later English adaptations of the story, and critical responses to Chaucer's uses of his source.
After a full review of criticism, Savoia explores Chaucer's use of motifs found in other romances. KnT exploits traditional romance only to transcend it, setting the "romance" of Palamon in the perspective provided by the "tragedy" of Arcite and…
Giordano, Roberta.
Avellino: Sinestesie, 2014. Open access ebook at https://en.calameo.com/read/005864328fc7b606cf080; accessed March 3, 2022.
Studies Chaucer's and Boccaccio's dream vision narratives and their references to dreaming in light of the history of the genre, focusing on the secularization of the genre, the rising importance of the poet as dreamer-viator, and aesthetic successes…
Chaucer's dream poems reflect the self-consciousness of "mise en abyme"--literally, "setting of the abyss"--used here to identify Chaucer's means of drawing attention to structural and thematic circularity and to poetics. …
Antelmi, Gerardina.
Estela González de Sande, ed., Interconexiones: Estudios comparativos de literatura, lengua y cultura italianas (Madrid: Dykinson, 2021), pp. 25-34.
Examines the "topos of the dream" in Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio and compares the dream vision in BD. Points to similarities with mystical and shamanic experiences toward ecstasy that go beyond the similarities and differences in the medieval…
Yazici, Mine.
Uluslararası İnsan Çalışmaları Dergisi [International Journal of Human Studies] 3.5 (2020), pp. 143–61. Doi: https://doi.org/10.35235/uicd.683181
Assesses A. Vahit Turhan's 1949 translation of CT into Turkish, using Skopos theory of translation to assess cultural differences in senses of humor that underlie Chaucer's text and the translation. In Turkish, with an abstract in English.
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…
Turner, Marion.
Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 46.1 (2016): 61-87.
Explores how John Arderne, Chaucer, and Thomas Hoccleve use the language of illness and healing in a wide range of texts, noting that the narrators present themselves as "flawed and sick" and that their narratives, like their bodies, are "not wholly…
Hilmo, Maidie.
Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, Maidie Hilmo, and Linda Olson, eds. Opening up Middle English Manuscripts: Literary and Visual Approaches (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 2012), pp. 245-89.
Examines illustrations of CT in several manuscripts, including the Hengwrt; Ellesmere; Bodley 686; and Tokyo, MS Takamiya 24 (formerly Devonshire); and portraits of Chaucer, exploring how manuscript illustrations "serve to shape the text and its…
Nolan, Maura.
Robert John Meyer-Lee and Catherine Sanok, eds. The Medieval Literary: Beyond Form (Cambridge: Brewer, 2018), pp. 213-41.
Explores individuality in visual and verbal portraiture, arguing that facial expressions or movements in art--i.e., "the extent to which a given image evokes or represents movement"--are the basis of perceptions of individuality in portraits.…
Kee, Kenneth.
English Studies in Canada 1 (1975): 1-12.
The Franklin, not to be identified as Chaucer's spokesman regarding marriage, frequently intrudes into his story in order to present a favorable self image before his listeners. His intrusions also divert his audience from serious moral issues his…
Frost, Cheryl.
Literature in North Queensland, Australia (James Cook University, North Queensland) 5.1 (1976): 37-45.
Jungian psychological analysis of the character of January, arguing that he shows the characteristics of the introverted type--capacity for abstraction, extreme subjectivity, and a resultant poor grasp of the outside world. January has trouble…
McEntire, Sandra J.
Chaucer Review 31 (1996): 145-63
Aurelius usurps and reinterprets Dorigen's speech. Through such devices, Chaucer subtly makes listeners and readers aware that what may appear to be real, whether concrete or ideological, may be illusion. The Franklin's intent is to assert his…
