Browse Items (16470 total)

Some examples of metathesis in CT and TC (e.g., ax/ask, thurgh/thrugh, open/opne) may result from modern editorial selection; others (e.g., lisped/lipsed in GP 1.264-65) may indicate Chaucer's creative indication of individual speech patterns.

A computer-assisted comparison of the Hengwrt and Ellesmere manuscripts of GP. Clarifies differences and similarities in spellings, lexis, syntax, and metrics in the two manuscripts.

A computer-assisted comparison of editions of BD, HF, and PF. Clarifies spellings, lexis, syntax, and metrics, analyzing versions by Benson, Robinson, Root, Brewer, and Havely.

Focuses on the occupatio that addresses Emelye's ritual ablutions in the temple of Diana. Discusses the way Chaucer identifies different modes of seeing--all-inclusive panoramic vision vs. the privileged view of the voyeur--with the Knight's staging…

A biography and social history of Chaucer's final years, focusing on Henry Bolingbroke's Lancastrian overthrow of Richard II and the political and social turmoil from which the usurpation resulted and to which it contributed. The book presents Thomas…

Traces the history of the motif of infernal punishment in the devil's anus, suggesting that the earliest evidence of the motif is found in the "Seven Heavens Apocryphon" of Irish visionary tradition and that Chaucer's use of the motif in SumP derives…

Chaucer's uses of the term trouthe (truth, integrity) indicate that he is a serious moralist, though sometimes ironic. Kane focuses on GP but also draws examples from FranT, CYT, Anel, and Langland's Piers Plowman.

Kanno examines instances of "mesure" and its synonyms in Chaucer's works, comparing those meanings with the virtue of moderation in Confucianism. The meanings range from "calculation" to "moderation." Generally, Chaucer's distinction between good and…

Sixteen essays on topics ranging from Old English semantics to Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, commemorating the 65th birthday of Akira Wada. For four essays that pertain to Chaucer, search for Love of Words: English Philological…

Karras surveys depictions of female commercialized sex in the English late Middle Ages. It is difficult, she suggests, to separate kinds and degrees of prostitution, because prostitution was regarded as an "extreme case" of the general sinfulness of…

Demonstrates that "Tudor editions of Chaucer imagined Chaucer himself as a Tudor poet" (109); concludes with three illustrations from Houghton Library copies of STC 5075 and 5077.

Kendrick compares the jocular action and imagery of the links in CT to the marginal imagery of Gothic psalters and Books of Hours.

Kendrick considers a portion of PardP (lines 352-88) in light of two thirteenth-century charlatans' spiels invented for performance by jongleurs: Rutebeuf's "Dit de l'herberie" and Peire Cardenal's "Dit de l'onguent."

CT accommodates apparently conflicting forms of address and confusions of narrative, dramatic, and expository genres. Chaucer manipulates a number of Northrup Frye's "radicals of presentation," allowing perpetual reinterpretation through the overlay…

Modern notions of the "key role of materiality in allegory," as theorized by Walter Benjamin and echoed by Paul de Man, have clear precedents in patristic and medieval commentaries on allegory and supposition, although the sense of "material" is more…

Reads the depiction of Troilus's love-sickness against "new theories of contagion" that resulted from the devastations of the plague. Criseyde internalizes the anti-feminist "logic of disease" and names herself the "infective other." Troilus's…

Comments on the five contributions to SAC 25's "Colloquium: The Manciple's Tale," reading them as a "snapshot of some of the ways . . . Chaucerians read today" and exploring how the interruptions and reversals in ManT efface moral distinctions.

Eight essays by various authors suggest that looking carefully at the ways characters speak in medieval texts gives information about the social networks of medieval society and reveals artistic skills of writers who considered speech significant.…

Collects forty-five documents and images as backgrounds to fourteenth- and fifteenth-century English literature; arranged under seven headings and keyed (by chart) to a variety of canonical Middle English literary texts. All of the selected texts are…

A single-volume encyclopedia with more than 2,000 entries, composed by a team of thirteen contributors and the editor. Alphabetized entries include each of Chaucer's works, important sources and analogues, character and place names, select…

Piety and pathos heighten the impact of PrT and promote the narrator's reputation for religious correctness, yet all aspects of her Tale are undermined by pointlessness. Greenwood argues that the Tale is dialogistic and Menippean; a satirical subtext…

ManT, Mel, and ParsT are hardly tales at all, but rather a joke, an allegory, and a sermon. Yet they provide interesting comparisons between speakers and listeners, ways of speaking and ways of holding back. Reading between the lines is needed before…

Explores the semantic and cultural background of the word "elvysshe" as applied to alchemy in CYT (8.751, 8.842). Like elves, alchemists were secretive, elusive, liminal figures, distrusted and associated with transformation. Though modern editors…

Considers the work of Chaucer, among others, as an example of non-hypertextual writing that nonetheless creates the user disorientation often associated with negotiations of hypertext.

Reads Form Age as a "document of hope"; its lamentation of present ills recalls the Golden Age of the past but does so to provide a blueprint for a perfect and enduring future.