Browse Items (16470 total)

In a larger investigation of the philosophical concept of sympathy, Lopez discusses the lack of sympathy, both personal and spatiotemporal, between May and January in MerT.

Akahori analyzes characteristics of May in MerT, focusing on her presence in January's garden and nuances of the adjective "fressh." Exploring instances of the word throughout CT, the author shows that its use in MerT is sarcastic.

Compares ClT with Boccaccio's tale of Griselda and the version by Juan de Timoneda, showing that Chaucer makes more extensive, more explicit, and more radical the class politics of the narrative, critiquing traditional assumptions about marriage and…

Highlights political aspects of ClT, interpreting the cruelty Walter inflicts on Griselda as a projection of his inner conflict between a hereditary ruler's "body politic" and his "body natural"--a conflict prompted by the pressure to provide an heir…

Pitard comments on William of St. Amour's "Tractatus brevis" and assesses SumT as a vernacularized adaptation of it--one in which fraternal pretenses are satirized for their Latinate elitism. The satire occurs because "it is hilarious that the friar…

SumT is not a hidden allegory, but a narrative that exploits characteristics of the fabliau to explore larger issues of morality and ethics. By focusing almost solely on the distribution of the "gift," critics have ignored most of the story and…

Numerous fourteenth-century documents that address the practice of extortion by institutional "middlemen" point to systemic problems rather than to individual turpitude. FrT reflects this contemporary explanation, albeit without exonerating the…

Wollstadt explores similarities between WBT and the ballad "The Knight and the Shepherd's Daughter," considering the rape motif, concern with "authority and victimization," the possibility that the ballad was transmitted by female oral singers, and…

Through otherworldly female characters, a number of Middle English romances and their French ancestors "interweave" heterosexual, romantic desire with magic and the supernatural. WBT, however, "subverts" this convention by reproving the violence of…

Assesses how WBT, FranT, and other Breton lays in Middle English "underwrite and reinforce the laws of the land"--laws that allowed for domestic violence and left ambiguous the relations between rape and marriage.

Alison constructs Jankyn as a liminal figure combining both courtly and clerical ideals so that she can celebrate "her triumph over a representative figure of both arenas" (95).

Gower's "Tale of Florent" was composed before its English analogues, including WBT, and is here anatomized as a series of folktale motifs. Peck also explores how the narrative is "put in a new dress" and made appropriate to its new functions by…

Female counsel is a consistent theme in Irish and English versions of the loathly lady story, in which women offer advice or prophesy to aristocrats. This theme reinforces connections among the analogous tales, paralleling the visual motif of female…

Eleven essays by various authors and an introduction by the editors. Each of the essays touches on WBT and its relationship with Irish and/or English analogues, and seven of them consider WBT at length. The volume includes an index. For the articles…

O'Neill surveys Chaucer's attitudes toward age and gender in CT, with particular focus on WBPT. In CT, the "medieval, ageing Englishwoman as a sexual being emerges with . . . dignity and vitality."

Surveys medieval commentary on women's enjoyment of sex, noting that sexual pleasure distinguishes Alisoun's marriage to Jankyn in WBP--a result of Jankyn's ability to read his wife's body like a text. Niebrzydowski contrasts Alisoun's sexual…

Compares and contrasts the strategies and outspoken polemics of WBP with those of Speght's "A Mouzell for Melastomus" (1617). Speght exposes antagonist Joseph Swetnam in ways similar to those used by Chaucer to expose the Wife.

Traces the logic of paradox from its roots in Zeno through Boethius's Consolation to its uses in WBPT. Notes examples from Alain de Lille and Jean de Meun and discusses the Wife of Bath's uses of synthesis beyond contradiction and paradox.

Interlinear Modern English translation of WBPT, with accompanying introduction and commentary presented as a pastiche of observations and reactions.

Surveys "some of the many roles played and influences exerted by women in the practice of medieval pilgrimage," considering literary texts and cultural contexts from the fall of Rome until Margery Kempe and the Paston women in the fifteenth century.…

In later medieval thought, spinning women represent two often contradictory ideas: rebellion against hierarchical order and, paradoxically, Marian obedience. Citing scripture, Chaucer's Wife fuses both viewpoints in WBP. When Lancastrian mores…

Introduction to WBT and its primary motifs, focusing on the raped maiden, the loathly lady, and Arthur's queen. Suggests that the Wife of Bath's "feminism is essentially phallocentricism [sic] in reverse."

Encourages pairing Margery Kempe and WBT in British literature surveys, noting that Kempe was "a good deal more vulnerable than the fictitious Wife of Bath."

As an example of popular folk narrative, "The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle" is flexibly open to multiple interpretations. Addressed to an elite audience, Gower's "Tale of Florent" and WBT lay claim to authority and function as exempla.

The Wife of Bath's "manipulations of the Argus and Midas myths" reflect her Ovid-like "delight in sensuality and embeddedness of narrative" and her recognition of the power of story to "control and deceive." The myths help unify WBPT; through them,…