Cooper, Helen.
Ardis Butterfield, ed. Chaucer and the City (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2006), pp. 109-28.
Cooper discusses the poetic confraternities called "puys," devoted to competitive writing of poetry. An edition and translation of Renaud de Hoiland's "Si tost c'amis" serves as an example of the kind of civil performance being rejected by the…
Cartlidge, Neil.
Corinne Saunders, ed. A Concise Companion to Chaucer (Malden, Mass.; Oxford; and Victoria: Blackwell, 2006), pp. 218-40.
Cartlidge examines the range of attitudes toward marriage, sexuality, and the family in CT - including questions of marriage as an ordering principle, sexuality as a threat to marriage, and sexuality as a form of aggression outside of marriage. Also…
Witalisz, Wladyslaw.
Marcin Krygier and Liliana Sikorska, eds. Naked Wordes in Englissh (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2005), pp. 169-80.
Witalisz explores ambivalent attitudes toward war in Middle English romances, particularly those concerned with Troy or King Arthur. Chaucer's attitude is "only implicit," and the anti-war stance attributed to him is based on "his deliberate silence…
Wheeler, Bonnie, ed.
New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
Seventeen essays by various authors on topics ranging from the Middle English St. Francis to the Passion plays, the York Cycle, John Wycliff, "Piers Plowman," Gower, Margery Kempe, and other medieval writers and their literature. For two essays that…
Watts explains the pedagogy of teaching the dream vision at the undergraduate level, covering texts that include Macrobius, the "Dream of the Rood," the" Roman de la Rose," Dante, "Pearl," "Piers Plowman," Christine de Pizan's "Book of the City of…
Vander Elst, Stefan Erik Kristiaan.
DAI A67.04 (2006): n.p.
Reads the Knight and Squire (and their respective tales) as embodiments of differing philosophies toward the Crusades. The Knight is linked to the Crusades' earlier origins, while the Squire is seen as embodying a more romanticized approach to the…
Turner, Marion.
Corinne Saunders, ed. A Concise Companion to Chaucer (Malden, Mass.; Oxford; and Victoria: Blackwell, 2006), pp. 13-33.
Divided into three sections - "Politics and Discourse," "London Life and Chaucer's Poetry," and "Chaucer's Social Circle" - this essay surveys a variety of Chaucer's narratives and short poems, showing how they reflect urban and political elements in…
Tambling, Jeremy.
Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2004.
Tambling reads several late medieval and Renaissance texts in relation to Walter Benjamin's notions of melancholy and Freudian concepts of death, as well as allegory and history. Individual chapters treat "Piers Plowman," Hoccleve's "Complaint and…
Schultz, James A.
Journal of the History of Sexuality 15.1 (2006): 14-29.
Schultz critiques uses of "heterosexual" as a term and as an ahistorical concept in queer studies of medieval literature. Chaucerian critics (and others) use the term in ways that "distort the very object" of their studies, "thwart" history, and…
Schibanoff, Susan.
Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006.
Schibanoff challenges the notion that Chaucer escaped from the decadent, "unmanly" influence of French verse to achieve his status as "father" of English poetry. In BD, Chaucer adopts the persona of "the weak, puerile, and loveless poet - the 'queer'…
Schaefer, Ursula, ed.
Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2006.
Nine essays by various authors with an introduction and epilogue that discuss literary and linguistic aspects of early standardization in English. For five essays that consider Chaucer specifically, search for Beginnings of Standardization under…
Thirteen essays intended for the new and returning student of Chaucer. Following the editor's introduction (pp. 1-10) describing facets of Chaucer's art and life and the contents of the collection, the work is divided into parts: Chaucer in Context,…
Saunders, Corinne [J.]
Juan Camilo Conde Silvestre and M. Nila Vázquez González, eds. Medieval English Literary and Cultural Studies (Murcia: Universidad de Muscia, 2004), pp. 121-43.
Surveys medieval beliefs and learning about magic and explores the narrative function and resonance of magic and the supernatural in Chaucer's writing. Also considers relations to natural philosophy or "science" and the shift from medieval to…
Saunders, Corinne [J.]
Helen Cooney, ed. Writings on Love in the English Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), pp. 45-61.
Apart from Chaucer's works, most romances in Middle English "rewrite" their French and Latin analogues, representing the virtuous aspects of love rather than the conventions of the courtly game. Chaucer's writing exemplifies the "extremes of fin…
Salih, Sarah, ed.
Rochester, N.Y.; and Woodbridge, Suffolk: D. S. Brewer, 2006.
Seven essays by various authors and an introduction by the editor. The book discusses late medieval English saints from a number of perspectives (readership, shrines and festivals, gender, historiography), with recurrent references to Chaucer,…
Robertson, Elizabeth.
English Language Notes 44.1 (2006): 77-79.
Robertson introduces a series of seven essays responding to Nicholas Watson's Speculum essay "Censorship and Cultural Change in Medieval England: Vernacular Theology, the Oxford Translation Debate, and Arundel's Constitutions of 1409" (Speculum 70…
Pearsall, Derek.
Ardis Butterfield, ed. Chaucer and the City (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2006), pp. 95-108.
Argues that a substantial turn away from the topic of idealized love in Chaucer's writing after 1387 demonstrates a shift in his real and imagined audiences. In the second half of his career, Chaucer's audience may have been an almost exclusively…
Patterson, Lee.
New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
Reprints seven of Patterson's essays, with a new introduction, "Historicism and Postmodernity" (pp. 1-18), that explains why he pursues the "micronarratives" of New Historicism rather than those of psychoanalytic criticism. Patterson affirms the…
Ogura, Michiko, ed.
Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2006.
Sixteen essays by various authors on linguistic topics in Old and Middle English, including a survey of the teaching of medieval English in Korea. The papers were presented at the first international conference of the Society of Historical English…
Minnis, Alastair, and Ian Johnson, eds.
New York: Cambridge University Press,2005.
A capacious survey of critical theory and application in medieval letters, with twenty-seven essays by various authors, arranged in seven sections: the liberal arts and Latin textuality, the study of classical authors, textual psychologies,…
McSheffrey, Shannon.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press: 2006.
An introduction, seven chapters, and a conclusion study marriage in London in the second half of the fifteenth century. The "fundamental argument is that bonds of marriage and sex were . . . intimate, deeply personal ties and matters of public…
