Browse Items (16471 total)

The debate between Prudence and Melibee is the struggle for "maistrie" between husband and wife. Learned and sophisticated, Prudence exhibits "feminine powers of persuasion." She changes from being "humble and respectful" to being "impatient,"…

In MkP, the Host associates the Monk with a sacristan or cellarer. Norsworthy surveys historical cellarers and the role of the cellarer according to the Rule of St. Benedict, connecting bad cellarers with MkT. The Monk's narratives pertain to tyrants…

The traditions of patristic and Franciscan fourfold allegorical interpretation and radical puns are evident in Dante's letter to Can Grande and in Boccaccio, Chaucer (MkT), and Marguerite de Navarre.

Examines various sources, intertextual relations, and the Bahktinian dialogism of NPT as aspects of its relations with Menippean satire.

Examines the use of prologues and epilogues in several narratives of the Reynard tradition (13th-15th centuries). NPT indicates Chaucer's preference for the prologue and the ambiguity of his assertions.

The "remedia" for the Black Knight's loss is achieved in two parts: the "reshaping" of the Black Knight's imaginative metaphor (chess representing the art of love) and the sounding of the castle bell, which awakens the poet and "ends both hunt and…

Documents evidence of women's participation in the uprising of 1381, considering judicial records, chronicles by Henry Knighton and Thomas Walsingham, and poetic depictions by Chaucer and Gower. In the chase scene of NPT, Chaucer depicts women as…

Argues for "literary" rather than "historicist" analysis, examining the tone and rhetoric of the reference to the uprising of 1381 in NPT and arguing that Chaucer was "distancing" himself from the events.

Although SNT has been considered a straightforward account of St. Cecilia, apocalyptic techniques make it more complex. Engaging apocalyptic imagination, Chaucer focuses on "eschatology, renovation, and the collapse of time."

A translation into Modern English of SNT, based on The Riverside Chaucer (3rd ed.). Includes a short introduction and select bibliography.

Parallels between Chaucer's treatment of Phebus [Apollo] and the treatments in Dante's "Paradiso" and Alain de Lille suggest that ManT reflects the literary tradition of Apollonian ineptitude and prepares the way for the Parson's Christian…

Comments on literary framing structures in manuals of religious instruction and confession, from the "Somme le Roi" to ParsT. Briefly compares ParsT to "Jacob's Well."

Compares the anonymous author of "Jacob's Well" to a priest of the same type as Chaucer's Parson, or a canon such as John Mirk.

Examines the "same-sex union of adoptive brotherhood" between the Summoner and the Pardoner and assesses the economic underpinnings of sworn brotherhood in FrT and SumT. Chaucer's alignment of homosexual and heterosexual issues in the Marriage Group…

Explores the "iconographic vocabulary" of Pentecost and its affiliations in Wolfram von Eschenbach's "Parzival," Dante's "Inferno," Lus de Cames's "Lusiads," and Chaucer's SumT. Chaucer's version combines details from verbal and pictorial traditions…

Examines several medieval notions of testing and promise-making, arguing that in ClT the Clerk makes fun of naive "essentialist" allegory. Haines reads wit and sarcasm in Griselda's tone at the "portentous" line 666 and suggests that this tone helps…

ClT reflects aspects of Richard II's life and philosophy of kingship--and perhaps Chaucer's fanciful solutions to Richard II's political dilemma of an heirless realm: divorce or a consort advisor. The insistence on "obedience to authority" in ClT…

Griselda reflects the "ordinary peasant woman" of Chaucer's age. Her anxieties about the burials of her children are similar to concerns found in guild records; both ClT and the guild records indicate late-medieval interconnections among poverty,…

Identifies "uncanny" resemblances between Griselda of ClT and Philippa de Coucy, wife of Robert de Vere. Similarities between the women and their treatment at the hands of their husbands (divorces) would have prompted Chaucer's immediate audience to…

Myles surveys medieval notions of natural and given signs, arguing that Griselda (and the reader with her) learns from her submission to Walter, insofar as it parallels a realist submission to quasi-nominalist understanding. Unlike Walter, Griselda…

Identifies possibilities for recognizing "political resonances" in ClT, discussing Walter's title (marquis) as it was granted in 1385 to Robert de Vere, Richard's favorite. The title was "unusual" and "short-lived" in Chaucer's experience. Olson…

The Clerk and T. S. Eliot's title character in "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" share intellectual interests. In addition, both are "caught" between the external and the internal, both are reluctant to speak, and both speak allusively.

Explores two folkloric motifs in ClT and "Lay le Freine": the patient wife and twin sisters who are rivals in love. Rooted in the same myth, the stories imagine alternatives to patriarchal culture as well as dramatizing wifely obedience and female…

Baker and Morrison read MerT as a "sustained response" to Piers Plowman B.9. Both works are concerned with marriage, gender, and the pursuits of appetite. Whereas MerT poses a woman who must live expediently, Piers Plowman absorbs gender into…

Reads MerT for the ways it confronts and rejects skeptical nominalism. The Merchant considers the possibility that language "has sense but no reference"--that it is only games--but the absurdity of January's decision to marry undercuts this notion,…