Hays, Peter.
English Language Notes 38: 57-64, 2001.
Chaucer's MerT may have influenced William Faulkner's "The Sound and the Fury." Each work presents the pear tree as a central symbol in a plot focused on greed and deception, one comic and the other tragic. Chaucer's and Faulkner's narratives also…
Hilles, Carroll.
New Medieval Literatures 4: 189-212, 2001.
Bokenham "strategically utilizes feminine piety" and his own "dullness" to express political dissent in a style that differs from the high rhetorical style of Gower, Chaucer, and Lydgate. He rejects their "classicizing, aureate" tradition, initiating…
Johnson, James D.
English Language Notes 38: 41-49, 2001.
Leigh Hunt's "The Tapiser's Tale" amplifies our understanding of Hunt as a nineteenth-century Chaucerian. The poem both imitates Chaucer's language and verse and utilizes the setting, plot, and key motifs from Charles MacFarlane's account of…
Skeat wrote a "Canterbury tale" in Middle English that admonishes the sin of covetousness, is thoroughly grounded in the Middle Ages, and fits into the scheme of CT. It reveals one of the more "relaxed moments" of this great Chaucer scholar, about…
King, Andrew.
Review of English Studies 52: 22-58, 2001.
Spenser calls attention to his sources and models in "The Faerie Queene." SqT, "Orlando Furioso," and English medieval romances are specific sources, while narrative collections such as CT, anthologies of romances, or perhaps Malory's "Morte Darthur"…
Identifies WBP as the inspiration for Harriet Byron's burning of a prayer book in the second act of Jane Austen's play, "Sir Charles Grandison," noting in both works the importance of hyperbole, the manipulation of language, and ironic commentary on…
Patterson, Lee.
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 23: 437-70, 2001.
Examines the "uncomfortable sense of selfhood" recorded in Hoccleve's works, a sense of an individual lost within the press of responsibilities. Patterson remarks on Chaucer's influence and suggests that the older poet was beyond conventional praise…
Stubbs, Estelle, ed.
Leicester : Scholarly Digital Editions, 2000.
Full-color complete facsimile of the Hengwrt manuscript (Hg) and the Merthyr fragment (Me) of CT. Includes transcriptions of Hg and the Ellesmere manuscript by Michael Pidd and Estelle Stubbs, arranged for comparison; transcription of Me by Paul…
Utz, Richard [J.]
Wladyslaw Witalisz, ed. "And Gladly Wolde He Lerne and Gladly Teche": Studies on Language and Literature in Honour of Professor Dr. Karl Heinz Göller (Kraków: Wydawnictno Uniwersytetu Jagiellonskiego, 2001)
Argues that John Koch ought to be considered one of the great editors of Chaucer's works, even though he is largely forgotten by Anglophone Chaucerians who downplay German contributions to the field.
Cladistics-the use of large-scale computer analysis of data, including variant readings-promises the possibility of identifying patterns of textual transmission. However, the inevitability of interpretive disagreement in selecting evidence or in…
Gillespie, Alexandra.
Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society 12.1: 1-26, 2000.
Considers 11 Caxton quarto editions of English verse (STC 17019, 17009, 17030, 1450, 17008, 17018, 17032, 4851, 5091, 5090, and 3303) that include works by Lydgate and Caxton, assessing the economy of their production and their provenances and…
Gorlach, Manfred.
Christa Jansohn, ed. Problems of Editing. Beihefte zu Editio, no. 14. (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1999)
Görlach surveys a selection of textual cruxes (Old English to Modern) that reflect the importance of linguistic evidence in editorial decisions, including two from Chaucer ("armee," GP 1.60; "Aueryll," GP 1.1) and one "quasi-Chaucerian" example…
Hanna, Ralph, [III].
Studies in Bibliography: Papers of the Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia 53: 163-72, 2000.
Examines variants in WBP 3.115-17 (especially "wight" versus "wright") to identify flaws in applying cladistic theory to manuscript stemmatics. Cladistic analysis underlies the Canterbury Tales Project.
Hanna, Ralph, [III].
Medium Ævum 69: 279-91, 2000.
Discusses the "household book" of Humphrey Newton and its relation to "central literary culture." MS Lat. Misc. C.66 includes a section of ParsT (10.601-29), a section of KnT (1.3047-56), and a letter imitating Troilus upon seeing Criseyde.
Hilmo, Maidie.
Kathryn Kerby-Fulton and Maidie Hilmo, eds. The Medieval Professional Reader at Work: Evidence from Manuscripts of Chaucer, Langland, Kempe, and Gower (Victoria, British Columbia: U of Victoria, 2001), pp. 14-71.
The Ellesmere miniatures are evidence of the process of text production--the shaping and preparation of the manuscript for aristocratic viewing--and a visual guide to the reading process. The illustrations foster the aristocracy's sense of…
Scholars continue to reflect on whether particular readings of CT are authorial revisions or scribal editing and on what Chaucer's plans for the work might have been. Understanding manuscript relationships for any particular tale can help set the…
Kerby-Fulton, Kathryn, and Maidie Hilmo, eds.
Victoria, British Columbia : U of Victoria, 2001.
An introduction and four essays suggest some methods and approaches for the recovery of medieval reader response from manuscript evidence. For two essays that pertain to Chaucer, search for Medieval Professional Reader at Work under Alternative…
Kerby-Fulton, Kathryn, and Steven Justice.
Kathryn Kerby-Fulton and Maidie Hilmo, eds. The Medieval Professional Reader at Work: Evidence from Manuscripts of Chaucer, Langland, Kempe, and Gower (Victoria, British Columbia: U of Victoria, 2001), pp. 217-37.
Codicological analysis of the "Taylor Gower," produced by scribe D, who also produced two manuscripts of CT. This scribe and his "shadow" scribe (Scribe Delta) indicate possible entrepreneurial activity among English vernacular copyists.
Mann, Jill.
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 23: 71-107, 2001.
Recent editors have privileged the Hengwrt (Hg) manuscript by attributing metrical and morphosyntactic features of Ellesmere (El) to editorial intervention rather than to scribal error. Mann traces the development of the "myth of the El editor,"…
Mayer, Lauryn Stacey.
Dissertation Abstracts International 62: 565A, 2001.
Studies the manuscript transmission ("more akin to gene splicing than copying") of Old English poetry and prose, chronicle histories, and Chaucer. To establish Chaucer as a forerunner of later poetry, printers deliberately modify his works.
Mooney, Linne R.
A. J. Minnis, ed. Middle English Poetry: Texts and Traditions. Essays in Honour of Derek Pearsall (Woodbridge, Suffolk; and Rochester, N.Y.: York Medieval Press, 2001), pp. 241-66.
Codicological analysis of the two manuscripts, which include works by Chaucer and Lydgate, Chaucerian apocrypha, and related works. Assessment of the booklets in the manuscripts and the habits of the two scribes ("scribe A" and the "Hammond scribe")…
Dalby, Richard.
Book and Magazine Collector 199: 46-59, 2000.
Surveys the sales performance of various editions of Chaucerian texts, concentrating on recent sales and auctions and on market values. Includes a brief survey of Chaucer's works and editions and responds to the auction of Caxton's first edition for…
