Dane, Joseph A.
Modern Language Review 99 (2004): 287-300
During the nineteenth-century construction of the fabliau as a distinct genre, scholars grouped ShT with other "coarse" tales and theorized that Chaucer had reassigned it from the Wife of Bath to the Shipman, assuming that the fabliau form was not…
Pearcy, Roy J.
English Language Notes 41.4 (2004): 1-10.
Pearcy traces the history and literary use of amphibology-'in Chaucer, a statement capable of two interpretations, uttered by a speaker with supernatural or oracular powers to a listener who can perceive only a meaning at variance with the true…
Minnis, Alastair.
New Medieval Literatures 6 (2003): 107-28.
Argues against specifying the Pardoner's sexuality, on the grounds that historical evidence discourages such specification and that specification can only render the character less enigmatic and thereby less queer. Sexual characteristics ascribed to…
Grigsby, Bryon Lee.
New York and London: Routledge, 2004.
Grigsby considers leprosy, bubonic plague, and syphilis, focusing on how they were constructed as moral phenomena and how literary depictions contributed to historical developments in our (mis)understandings of them.
Green, Richard Firth.
Mediaevalia 8 (1985 for 1982): 351-58.
The Pardoner is characterized not by signs of homosexuality, but by indication of effeminacy, thought in the Middle Ages to indicate carnality. Green offers parallels in works by Gower and Lydgate.
The discourse of PardPT "disrupts binary structures and exposes the fallacy of essentialist ideologies"; it "interrogates the literary and social consequences of identity categories" assumed in "christological exegesis." The Pardoner's relics recall…
Benson, C. David.
Mediaevalia 8 (1985 for 1982): 337-49
The Pardoner should be read not as a real person but as an allegorical figure. Modern discussions overemphasize the Pardoner's sexuality and distort the fact that hints about his sexuality prepare for the more important concern with his…
Chaucer's changes to source material emphasize what shapes a person and how she comes to understand and experience the world. If Virginia had continued to refuse her father and Virginius had cut off his daughter's head despite her protests, the Tale…
FranT and the "Tempest" share not only similarities in plot, character, and theme but also an engagement with the "status of poetry as allusion and conjuring act." The sense of "fiction dissolving into real life, and the voice of the narrator…
Chaucer modeled the prayer for the removal of the rocks on a cluster of literary precedents, from Boccaccio to Boethius, Ovid, and Marian lyrics. Chaucer was as interested in the works' interpenetration as in the ironic tensions among them.
Bodden, M. C.
Jennifer C. Vaught, ed., with Lynne Dickson Bruckner. Grief and Gender: 700-1700 (New Yorl: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp. 51-63.
In FranT and ClT, masculine grief is aligned with courtly ideals of gentility; feminine grief, with courtly suffering. By complicating these associations and disallowing consolation of grief, Chaucer intervenes in the "discursive practices" of the…
Ambrisco, Alan S.
Chaucer Review 38 (2004): 205-28.
The Squire's "bad use of occupatio and his self-conscious admissions of rhetorical inadequacy" preserve the foreign, "acknowledging Mongol cultural differences but failing to clarify the terms on which such differences rest." Through "this rhetoric…
In MerT and two French fabliaux ("Les perdris" and "Le prestre qui abevete"), the "victims' justifiably skeptical search for visual proof" paradoxically results in deceptive "visual confirmation." Examining how this process takes place may elucidate…
Scanlon, Larry.
New Medieval Literatures 6 (2003): 129-65
Scanlon reads ClT against a historical tension between aristocratic arranged marriage and canonist marriage of consent, focusing on the espousal scene, the papal letter forged by Walter, and the conclusion and Envoy of the Tale.
Scanlon, Larry.
Fiona Somerset and Nicholas Watson, eds. The Vulgar Tongue: Medieval and Postmedieval Vernacularity (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003), pp. 220-56.
Scanlon considers contemporary ideas of vernacular literature and its potential for "subversiveness" through incompleteness, focusing on the concept of "poet laureate" as introduced into English by Chaucer in ClT and on the interdependence of…
Bodden, M. C.
Mark D. Meyerson, Daniel Thiery, and Oren Falk, eds. 'A Great Effusion of Blood'? Interpreting Medieval Violence (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2004), pp. 216-40.
Bodden reads ClT as Chaucer's deconstruction of the violence of hagiography. Plot and purported allegory clash in the Tale, and Walter is concerned not with Griselda's obedience but with her outward show. Virtue without will is no virtue at all. The…
In light of medieval commentary on sound, the fart at the end of SumT allows a wide range of "physical, political, social, clerical, and intellectual" reverberations, particularly ones associated with the Peasants' Uprising of 1381. Travis also…
Read in the context of Proverbs 21-14 ("a gift in secret pacifieth anger; and a reward in the bosom, strong wrath"), Thomas's gift is comic and condemns Friar John.
Geltner, G.
Studies in Philology 101 (2004): 357-81.
Reexamines antimendicancy in Jean de Meun's "Roman de la Rose" and in CT, suggesting that Jean's portraits of friars should be seen primarily as portraits of hypocrisy and that Chaucer's portrayals of friars (especially in SumT) are mediated by the…
Although erotic and homosexual elements are undoubtedly evident in SumT, certain words and gestures, particularly the friar's ill-fated grope, do not unambiguously have the homosexual charge that has been claimed.
Ziolkowski, Jan.
Journal of Medieval Latin 12 (2002): 90-113
Traces the tradition of characterizing stories as "old wives' tales" from Plato through Apuleius and Jerome to Chaucer's WBT, showing how the genre draws power from the paradox that "old women were the least powerful members of society and yet the…
An Anglo-Norman piece in BL MS Harley 2253 copied about 1340 is analogous to WBP in tone, wit, and "outrageousness." Chaucer might have known this story of two women discussing the virtues of chastity versus sexual license. Includes text and…
Moore, Jeanie Grant.
Laurel Amtower and Dorothea Kehler, eds. The Single Woman in Medieval and Early Modern England: Her Life and Representation (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2003), pp. 133-46.
As an often-married single woman, the Wife of Bath confronts and eludes the "binarisms that contained married women": married/not married, male/female, experience/authority, etc. In the fantasy of WBT, she succeeds partially in creating a "world of…
