Browse Items (16470 total)

Comments on Chaucer's life and works, focusing on his narrative timing, depth of characterization, and linguistic subtlety as means to express sympathy for human weakness. Includes three glossed passages from CT and two wood engravings by Barry Moser…

Suggests that efforts to create "verse-narratives" in the manner of Dante and Chaucer might be useful tools in the teaching of writing.

Describes efforts at the University of Birmingham (between 2000 and 2005) to incorporate web-based materials (computer-mediated materials and virtual learning environments) into teaching Chaucer and Middle English. Also considers methods of assessing…

Circumstances of transmission affect not only how authors are received but also how they write. This effect was particularly strong in late medieval culture, when authors such as Chaucer, William Langland, and Margery Kempe were aware that readers…

Studies the "impact of judicial complaint on the formation of literary practice" in late medieval England, describing the "emergence and development" of the "literature of clamour" and exploring the influence of this literature on the rise of English…

Includes recurrent attention to Chaucer studies, while exploring the history of feminism in medieval studies and the need for a "dialectical questioning" between concerns of particular historical women and their more general contexts.

Reviews scholarship on Chaucer and London and briefly examines the impact of the Black Death, noting that "the threat of death is everywhere in Chaucer's work." An appendix lists "Recent Studies Treating Chaucer and London."

Thirty brief essays on teaching TC, BD, HF, PF, LGW, and the lyrics, divided into four groups and an appendix: (1) materials (survey of editions and teaching aids by the editors); (2) backgrounds (lyrics, William A. Quinn; French tradition, Karla…

Phillips investigates "the intersection between unofficial speech, pastoral practice, and literary production in late medieval England," focusing on pastoral and penitential injunctions against gossip, "idle talk," and "janglyng" and on literary…

Examines attempts to associate Chaucer's works with qualities (assumed or inferred) that constitute "Englishness" and argues that such associations were products of nineteenth- and twentieth-century xenophobia (usually anti-French). Chaucer's works…

Masciandaro investigates the vocabulary of work (travail, labour, swink, werk, craft) and its cultural significance in late medieval England, exploring depictions of the history of work in Middle English literature (including Gower, a treatise on…

Objective evaluation reveals the "elusive" and contradictory "evidence" on which chronologies of Chaucer's works--and, most notably, constructions of his artistic maturation--are based. These constructions are essentially interpretive activities;…

Lochrie theorizes what sexualities, particularly female sexuality, might "have looked like before heterosexuality and the normal" were constructed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by statistical practices, exploring various medieval texts,…

Considers classical and medieval attitudes toward automata and mirabilia as context for analyzing their presence and depictions in late medieval English culture, especially in works by Langland, Chaucer, Gower, and Mandeville. Chapter 2, "Chaucer and…

Includes three essays on Middle English language (fricative spellings, 'before' as a temporal conjunction, and multiple negation) and four on Middle English literature (an East Anglian miracle play, Malory's "Morte Darthur," TC, and Sheela-na-gig…

A review of four semesters' course work with E. Talbot Donaldson suggests the organic connection for him between teaching and scholarship.

Discusses prayer in various contexts. Chaucer depicts prayer as a means to explore "thorny issues of theology" and often places his prayers in "pagan contexts."

Ten essays by various authors, along with a foreword, an introduction, an "otherword," and an afterword. Topics range from high to low culture and explore relationships between reality and performance, including comparisons of medieval literature to…

An introduction to Chaucer for elementary and junior high school students, with nine chapters arranged biographically from boyhood to "final years." Each chapter includes a quiz. The apparatus includes a chronology and timeline, a bibliography, and…

Eleven essays by various authors, with an introduction by the editor and a survey of spatial theory and medieval literature by John M. Ganim. For five essays that pertain to Chaucer, search for Place, Space, and Landscape in Medieval Narrative under…

Ten essays by various authors discuss comedy in Old English literature and in several Middle English media: drama, narrative poetry, stained glass, illuminations, and misericords. For three essays that pertain to Chaucer, search for Medieval English…

Thirteen essays by various authors, most focusing on depictions or deferrals of the erotic in Middle English romances, with other topics such as a branch of the "Mabinogi," female Jewish libido, fifteenth-century letters, and more. The editors'…

In opposition to Robertson's "patristic exegesis," Donaldson models a practice of engaging the autonomy of medieval texts. In the process, he adopts a critical persona that, feminist critiques notwithstanding, "is a decorous fiction which may or may…

In juxtaposition to D. W. Robertson's comprehensive historicist method, E. Talbot Donaldson's "fundamentally rhetorical mode of analysis" also constituted a historicist approach, but one that moved from philological detail "toward some larger whole,"…

Classifies approximately 220 mythological characters that appear in Chaucer's works: supernatural creatures, human beings, and other classical references. Describes and analyzes the presence of Ascalafo, Canace, and Midas in Chaucer, focusing…