Browse Items (16470 total)

Excerpted from Chaucer's LGW and thus lacking a narrative frame, the Legend of Thisbe in the Findern manuscript leaves room for the assumption that the manuscript's female readers saw Thisbe "as simply a victim." The excerpt's codicological context,…

Eight essays by various authors, with an index and an introduction by the editor, who argues that Alceste's mediation is central to LGW, a poem about the "public dimension of ideal female behavior." The poem is best understood in the context of late…

Coleman surveys the betrothals, marriage, and literary patronage of Philippa of Lancaster, suggesting that she may have given Chaucer a copy of Deschamps's "Ballade 765," which may have helped to inspire Chaucer's interest in flower and leaf debates…

HF reflects Chaucer's efforts to imitate Dante's innovation and use of the vernacular; the poem shows Chaucer's struggles with nonstandard forms of English and the lack of an English literary tradition.

Davis discusses Alexander Pope's "The Temple of Fame," a translation of HF.

Coletti compares HF with Christine de Pizan's "Livre du chemin de long estude," exploring their differing comments on and responses to their shared literary culture. Through parallel narrative gestures, the two poets consider textual authority,…

Williams summarizes the plots and themes of BD, PF, HF, and LGW, emphasizing Chaucer's layering of sources, his valorizing of English, and his concerns with interpretation and the truth value of literature.

Considers relationships among apocalypse, history, and literary closure in Dante's Paradiso, Chaucer's BD, and Pearl. Dante brings apocalypse into history, while the other two poets use it to contrast human temporality.

Examines Chaucer's varied and metaphorical use of "herte" in BD. In Japanese.

Ogura examines the lexicon of emotion (anger, fear, joy, pleasure, sorrow, wonder) in translations of Boethius by Jean de Meun, Chaucer, and Elizabeth I. Chaucer effectively uses three levels of word pairs: native, foreign, and combinations of…

Applies a technique from evolutionary biology - phylogenetic "neighborhood-joining" - to the witnesses to the text of Astr to produce a stemma, test the fragments and sections of longer versions against the stemma, and discuss the scribal conflation…

Investigates the anti-Lancastrian sentiments underlying Gascoigne's account of Chaucer's "deathbed repentance for his literary sins" in Ret.

The indictment of fashionable male clothing in ParsT (10.422-30, "Superbia") is a "homoerotic moment" reflecting the Parson's own "scopophilic" pleasure, although the "turn to the fashionable female neutralizes any homoerotic tendency."

Centers on medieval self-definition rather than subjectivity and studies examples of Wycliffite lay instruction. The Lollards rejected auricular confession and emphasized personal contrition for sin. Lollard pastoral texts disrupted traditional…

Huxtable surveys medieval philosophical and religious understanding of sight and color as background to commentary on social concerns with color in sumptuary habits and heraldry. In ParsT 10.424-27, colorful clothing indicates a sinful nature.

Collette offers Umberto Eco's notion of a "rhizome labyrinth's indefinite structure" as a heuristic tool for describing the relationship of a text to its "cultural matrix" rather than to specific sources. Focuses on CYT.

CYT is Chaucer's London tale par excellence; its "craft sounds" evoke both what the city is and what it is not.

Little reevaluates the Christian iconography in SNT in light of the Wycliffite debate over the use of images and their potential to become idolatry. Despite the importance of visual images, SNT shows a shift toward words and texts.

Depicting an idealized portrait of the early church, SNT is a means to critique the church of Chaucer's own time.

Exemplifies text/image relationships by examining a number of misericords depicting scenes from the beast fable tradition of Reynard and other sly foxes. Considers the role of NPT in the development of this visual tradition.

In Mel, Chaucer depicts space reflecting the split interests and antagonisms that dominated contemporary London.

Linguistic and economic background to uses of ivory in medieval decoration, including the saddle of Sir Thopas (Th 7.875-78).

A study of five Middle English lists of romances, including the list in Chaucer's Th (7.897-902). Liu uses the "prototype theory of categorization" from cognitive linguistics to provide the rationale for a flexible yet rigorous definition of the…

Børch discusses Th as an "oral romance," surveying its oral characteristics and exploring how these characteristics - when they are written - help to parody the "chivalric ethos" that underlies the genre of romance. Th also exposes for consideration…

Accusations of eucharistic host desecration in Prague in 1389 may be read as a backdrop for PrT. Stanbury summarizes the events of mob violence that led to a massacre of Jews.