Browse Items (16470 total)

Set against the eschatology of the Last Judgment, medieval narratives prompt their audiences to employ complex - often deferred - criteria for interpretation or evaluation. Shimomura considers how audience judgment is engaged and complicated in…

Reads the opposition between the Clerk and the Wife of Bath in light of Derrida's opposition between the structuralist desire to decipher signs and the poststructuralist impulse to play with the "instability of signs." The Wife is an "anachronistic…

In the Wife of Bath, Chaucer radically remakes La Vieille from the Roman de la Rose, granting her true wisdom and authority. The Wife of Bath successfully uses Latin tradition and academic techniques in WBP, and WBT reflects the profound wisdom of…

Explores the "connection between dirty words and dirty things," focusing on the speech of "three outspoken female figures": Raison and La Vieille from the "Roman de la Rose" and Chaucer's Wife of Bath. While Raison attacks "linguistic equivocation"…

Establishes a link between the "preamble" in WBP and the sermon genre.

Following a methodology outlined in Gabriel Naud's seventeenth-century history of magic, the essay examines early modern historical accounts of magic to understand how magic came to be defined and debated. The title derives from WBT.

Guardia Massó examines ecclesiastical and sexual suppression in Lollardy, "Piers Plowman," and CT (especially in WBP).

WBPT can be seen as Alison's "therapeutic" attempts to "educate the public at large" about domestic violence and rape. Although she succumbs at times to the rhetoric of "the woman as commodity" and misunderstands herself as "unrapeable," Alison…

Driver explores how the Roman de la Rose was "re-written" for late medieval audiences in various ways: Chaucer advocates contemporary views of the work in his adaptation of La Vieille in WBP, and Pizan criticizes such views in her Book of the Three…

Desmond studies the discourse of erotic violence in medieval literature and iconography, surveying depictions of the "mounted Aristotle" and focusing on the adaptations of material from Ovid's "Ars Amatoria" found in the letters of Héoïse and…

Cawsey examines features of medieval tales of Tutivillus and explores how representations of female "discursive communities" and gossip in WBPT and plays about Noah illuminate these features through similar concerns with marginalized speech.

Read against Foucault's "What Is an Author?" the Wife of Bath of WBP fits the criteria for representation of a "third ego." Thereby, she can be seen as a character who "establishes her own personality." Chaucer serves as a "medium for her determined…

Includes brief discussion of the Wife of Bath's claim that verbal disorder is the special preserve of women; in this way, the Wife shares important parallels with the unruly wife of Noah in the Chester and York Flood plays.

Commentary on "The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnell" that emphasizes partnership in marriage. Occasional references to WBT.

Anxious about the threat of Eastern hegemony and the increasing authority of merchant women, the narrator of MLT crafts characters that subtly feminize the East, "Orientalize" the feminine, and discredit women's economic participation as a threat to…

In the context of an analysis of a news-hungry medieval culture, one chapter examines Chaucer's suspicion of written documents in MLT.

Revised version of an essay of the same title in Studies in the Age of Chaucer 24 (2002): 149-80.

In MLT, Chaucer uses the case of Custance's Latin being understood by Northumbrians - an instance of xenoglossia, more characteristic of the saint's life genre - to focus on translation in various genres and to make Custance, "subtly active," an "apt…

In view of Chaucer's resistance to the "finality of closure," allusions to CkT in Fragment 9 suggest that CkT "may be complete for Chaucer, although not completed by the Cook." Perhaps the Tale's "unfinished business" is an interruption by one of the…

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.

Yvernault focuses on the narrative imbalance in MilT caused by the intrusions of the margin through description of holes and through open and broken architectural structures.

When Absolon "froteth" his lips upon realizing the real target of his kiss in MilT, he acts in accordance with his training as a barber-surgeon. More than a synonym for "to rub," the verb "froten" connotes a range of medical and surgical approaches…

Lyons describes twenty-four journeys derived from early travelogues, now known to be fictional or fanciful. Includes description of the likely spurious "Inventio Fortunata," attributed to Nicholas of Lynn by Richard Hakluyt. Also speculates that…

Cannon explores the critique in MilT of the limited Boethianism of KnT. The double plot of MilT and its emphasis on turning harm to joke are more genuinely Boethian than is the tragic emphasis of KnT.

Explores links between privacy and urban spaces in Fragment 1 of CT, especially MilT, in which each of the major male characters fails to control his own "pryvetee." The article follows Pierre Bourdieu in conceptualizing the practices of privacy as a…