Browse Items (16470 total)

The pedagogic techniques in "Liber Catonianus," a standard textbook used by Chaucer, show the combination of grammar and morality, the study of the "artes" as a study of ethics,and the integration of the ethical in the "Septennium" of the liberal…

Chaucer created a literary dialect that influenced writers centuries later. Elliott focuses on Chaucer's dialect, pronunciation, and grammar; Hardy's words and syntax; and Garner's rythms and cadences.

Argues that Chaucer and Gower were "hardly essential reading " at the court of Richard II, although some evidence indicates that they were being read. Such evidence includes comments on Sted, TC, LGW, Scog, and works by Gower.

Godwin's literary criticism of Chaucer's poetry contributed to the Romantic conception of Chaucer the man. His "Life" gives insight into the idea of the Middle Ages in early-nineteenth-century England.

The distinctive form of literary criticism in the medieval canon of classics in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries is evidenced by an examination of one of the characteristic types of treatise that resulted from the association of poetry with…

Surveys the conventions of English and French courtly literature, emphasizing backgrounds, setting, plot structure, the contributions of Machaut and Froissart, and the influence of the "Pearl." A closing chapter on BD explores how and in what ways…

Significantly, the setting of GP is located outside the limits of London proper, and most of the pilgrims are not Londoners. CkT offers a clear vision of fourteenth-century London and reflects what is both good and appalling about the city.

Fowler explores literary character and characterization as processes of the reader's engagement with "social persons" posited by a given text through various habituated devices and understood in light of various historical contexts-psychological,…

In her poem "The Author's Dreame," Lanyer uses the medieval dream vision, allusions to Chaucer (HF) and other poets, and Renaissance and biblical tropes to criticize as well as praise her patrons; however, her authority is threatened by the use of…

HF contains an inordinate number of lists of seemingly disparate materials in random order. Chaucer challenges the concept of authority by suggesting that the lists themselves provide the "authority"--not any one central force. Readers authorize a…

Thirty-four essays in English and French by various hands, arranged under five categories: (1) Configuring the Feminine; (2) Lyric Voice, Poetic Style: From Troubadours to Rhetoriqueurs; (3) Amor: Ethos and Affect; (4) Fictions of Identity and…

The medieval understanding of "translatio" comprises not only recasting in another language but also literary interpretation. In drawing on the "Roman" (already richly allusive), Chaucer adapts Jean de Meun's "mirouer" technique for works of various…

Source study of "Ywain and Gawain," "Sir Launfal," and NPT that explores how the process of appropriation reflects social, economic, political, and ideological continuities and transformations.

Comments on Harry Mileham's painting of the Canterbury pilgrims, depicted in a tavern during the telling of PardPT. Mileham is sensitive to literary and historical detail, derived especially from GP and the Ellesmere illustrations. The painting…

Discusses Scottish poets' uses of Chaucer, both to deepen their own works and to establish their own independent literary tradition. Instances include "Kingis Quair," which incorporates motifs from TC and KnT; Henryson's work; and Gavin Douglas's…

Almost all studies of Middle English language and style are flawed in method or lacking in comprehensiveness. The reaction of the medieval audience to dialectal differences is hard to gauge; e.g., sociolinguistic implications of the Northern dialect…

Studies the historical underpinnings of the GP descriptions of the Knight and Squire and discusses KnT and SqT for the ways they reflect the development of the Squire's "Romantic Chivalry" out of the Knight's "Religious Chivalry," questioning the…

Essays by various hands. For two essays that pertain to Chaucer, search for Literary and Historical Perspectives of the Middle Ages under Alternative Title.

Chaucer's catalog of women in LGWP contains attributes specifically chosen to reflect both the themes of the work itself and allusions to other literary works on the respective characters. Chaucer thus demonstrates his knowledge of previous…

Utz's interdisciplinary study parallels the tenets of late-medieval nominalism and the main features of Chaucer's TC.

Originating as a device of classical rhetoric, the exemplum became a genre in its own right through the church. Preachers brought it to a lay audience, and poets (Gower, Chaucer, Hoccleve, and Lydgate) eventually secularized it in various ways.

There are in CT examples of the late medieval attack on the symbolic attitude. The literal use of the Song of Songs in MerT, and the Wife of Bath's scriptural interpretation, are respectively examples of the mockery and parody of analogical thought.

Clarifies "two distinct modes of ekphrasis, the literal and the literary," exploring how and where they are deployed in HF (storm at sea and wall paintings of Dido and Aeneas) and in "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" (castle description and Gawain's…

In BD, Chaucer uses "the ambiguous status of the dream, as irresponsible fantasy and as vision of truth," to defend poetic fiction. Only in the "context of the figurative" does "the literal possess its full rhetorical power."

The sense of individual authorship and the acceptance of English as a literary language were eventually accomplished by Chaucer, who, though he sometimes assumed authority through his guise of translator, became the model for subsequent English…