Steiner, Emily, and Candace Barrington, eds.
Ithaca, N.Y., and Londons : Cornell University Press, 2002.
Nine New Historicist essays by various authors, assessing the intersections of legal history and literature and addressing Robin Hood, the N-Town Trial play, The Owl and the Nightingale, alliterative poetry, Lollard preaching, and works by Chaucer,…
Summit, Jennifer.
Chicago and London : University of Chicago Press, 2000.
Historicizing the "commonplace" conception that women writers stand in opposition to literary tradition, Summit assesses how the conception itself "dialectically fashioned both 'the woman writer' and 'English literature' in the medieval and early…
Treharne, Elaine, ed.
Cambridge : D. S. Brewer, 2002.
Six essays by various authors treat the Old English "Judith," Veronica in Anglo-Saxon England, the treatment of women in Middle English romances, and three tales in CT. For the three essays that pertain to Chaucer, search for Writing Gender and Genre…
Trigg, Stephanie.
Minneapolis and Londons : University of Minnesota Press, 2002.
Examines critical discourses from the late Middle Ages to the late twentieth century that have constructed Chaucer for, and mediated his poetry to, subsequent readers. Trigg explores "Chaucer's status as an exemplary canonical author for English…
Trigg explores how efforts to introduce philology and recent challenges to canonicity complicate Chaucer pedagogy and its relations with the teaching of other medieval authors, contemplating questions of Chaucer's continuing appeal despite these…
Surveys the nineteenth- and twentieth-century development of Chaucer study in Germany and Austria and examines the reception of this study in England and America. German philological practice established a standard that was distrusted after World War…
Utz, Richard (J.)
Dieter Kastovsky, Gunther Kaltenbck, and Susanne Reichl, eds. Anglistentag 2001 Wien: Proceedings (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2002), pp. 253-63.
Surveys the German reception of Chaucer's works between 1934 and 1947, specifically the role of philological approaches and their adaptability or resistance to Nazi ideologies. Utz stresses Ernst Robert Curtius's role in re-establishing prestige and…
Questions why Chaucer was not more popular with late-eighteenth-century "antiquarians and pseudomedieval dabblers," arguing that Chaucer had already been "co-opted" by earlier Enlightenment culture, "de-coupled" from his age, and valued for his…
Zeeman, Nicolette.
Jeremy Dimmick, James Simpson, and Nicolette Zeeman, eds. Images, Idolatry, and Iconoclasm in Late Medieval England: Textuality and the Visual Image (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 2002, pp. 43-62.
For Chaucer and other medieval writers, "the figure of the idol is a means of focusing on problematic aspects of imaginative textuality and its contexts" (44). The sculptures in HF and Lollius in TC are partially represented or broken figures of…
Akbari, Suzanne Conklin.
Kathryn Lynch, ed. Chaucer's Cultural Geography (New York and London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 102-34.
Comments on such terms and concepts as "nacioun," "degree," "countre," race, and geography in KnT, SqT, MLT, and WBT, indicating that in CT the world is ordered by the principles of geography and nation. Nationalism is emergent in CT, but Orientalism…
Assesses the first-person narrator of CT as a "portrayal of a poet in the act of constructing a poem," focusing on how diction and syntax call attention to the narrator.
Combining cognitive and ethnographic approaches to proverb study, Bradbury examines proverb use in Fragment 1 of CT. She explores the limitations of the cognitive theories of Richard Honeck, on the one hand, and George Lakoff and Mark Turner, on the…
Language, money, and gender are "signifying systems" that underlie notions of law and order in medieval tradition. Cady examines how Chaucer presents the interactions of these systems in WBPT, MerT, and PardT.
Cruz Cabanillas, Isabel de la.
María Dolores Fernández de la Torre Madueño, Antonia Mara Medina Guerra, and Lidia Taillefer de Haya, eds. El Sexismo en el lenguaje. 2 vols. (Málaga: Disputacíon Provincial de Málaga, 1999), vol. 1, pp. 261-70.
Describes female sexual stereotyping in Chaucer's depictions of the Wife of Bath, Griselda (ClT), Custance (MLT), Dorigen (FranT), and the Prioress (GP).
Heidt, Edward R.
Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen, 1994.
Chronological survey of representative depictions of church ministers in a variety of works, from Chaucer to Morris West, briefly considering works by Shakespeare, Trollope, John Henry Newman, George Eliot, Ibsen, Edmund Gosse, Joyce, Graham Greene,…
In CT (especially WBT, PardT, CYT, PhyT, SNT, and MLT), Chaucer shares with Wyclif the belief that the Church had lost its miraculous power and its focus on salvation, and he stresses the importance of the individual's role in personal salvation. For…
Knight, Stephen.
Rick Rylance and Judy Simons, eds. Literature in Context (Houndmills, Basingstoke; and New York: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 1-14.
Comments on the historical, religious, social, literary, and linguistic contexts necessary to understand Chaucer's subtleties and subversions throughout CT, but especially in GP. Includes close reading of GP 1.1-18.
Ladd, Roger A.
Studes in Philology 99 : 17-32, 2002.
By fitting merchants directly into his larger exploration of the relationship of sentence and solaas, Chaucer uses them to test the limits of the satiric form that dominated previous literary discussions of trade. Portraying merchants as consistently…
Considers moral casuistry in Gower and CT, arguing that Chaucer and Gower pose for the reader's discovery "practical precepts" that rely on the "rhetoric of exemplarity and the deliberation of readers," rather than relying on hard-and-fast religious…
Morris, Colin, and Peter Roberts, eds.
Cambridge and New York : Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Nine essays by various authors explore the activities and significance of pilgrimage in medieval and early modern England, focusing on "shrine-seekers," Thomas Becket, regional and international practice, and related topics. None of the essays…
Nelson, Marie.
Papers on Language and Literature 38: 167-99, 2002.
Nelson assesses medieval conceptions of marital "debt" (reflected in ParsT) in light of modern Speech Act Theory (Austin and Searle). The Wife of Bath's focus on the husband's contribution and the Merchant's focus on the wife's contribution reveal…
Curran, S. Terrie.
Prospect Heights, Ill.: Waveland, 2002.
A linguistic history of Old and Middle English that uses several Chaucerian examples to explain changes in morphology and phonology. Chapter 12 discusses Chaucer's contributions to English, to poetry, and to prosody. The apparatus indexes the…
Hanna encourages more refined analysis of Chaucer's lexical practice, especially examination of patterns of choices between English and French synonyms.
Hoad challenges critical discussions of specific words and syntactical emphases in Chaucer on the grounds that modern linguistic intuition is unreliable, comparison of medieval uses is often flawed, and medieval commentary can be misleading.…
