Doniger, Wendy.
Chicago and London : University of Chicago Press, 2000.
A cross-cultural, transhistorical anatomy of one motif in the "mythology of sex" in literature and film--the "story of going to bed with someone whom you mistake for someone else." Discusses structuralist and psychoanalytic explanations of variations…
Carnegie, Teena A. M.
Dissertation Abstracts International 60: 2472A, 1998.
Experience, here defined in the context of feminist criticism, gives women the capacity to differentiate themselves from others as well as to identify with them. Gendered experience is examined in the works of many authors from antiquity to the…
Biddick, Kathleen.
Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 30: 449-62, 2000.
Reading the loathly lady's discourse on gentilesse (WBT) against the Statutes of Kilkenny (imposed by the English crown on the Anglo-Irish in 1366) highlights the conflict of nobility as defined either by blood line or by behavior (sanguinity or…
Beidler, Peter G.
Chaucer Review 34: 388-97, 2000.
In GP, the Wife's "foot-mantel" is not a "skirt," but a set of leggings or riding chaps, pulled up over the feet and legs from the bottom. "Large" refers not to the size of the Wife's hips, but to the loose drapery of the garment. The Wife may be…
Woods, William F.
Publications of the Medieval Association of the Midwest 7: 84-107, 2000.
Reads MLT as an "allegory of will," a Christian response to the "Boethian stoicism" of KnT that transcends mundane mercantilism by dramatizing an "investment of self." As "God's merchant," Custance transforms herself and converts others through a…
Rothwell, William.
D. A. Trotter, ed. Multilingualism in Later Medieval Britain (Cambridge; and Rochester, N.Y.: D. S. Brewer, 2000), pp. 213-32.
Studies the "York Memorandum Book" for examples of the ways Latin, French, and English "intertwined" in medieval England. Rothwell opens with commentary on the vocabulary of a passage from MLP in which Chaucer "Englishes" several French words and…
Lavezzo, Kathryn Marie.
Dissertation Abstracts International 61: 603A., 1999.
The remoteness and insularity of England led to the belief that its people were different, both barbarian and angelic. Lavezzo discusses Aelfric, Higden, Chaucer (MLT), and the alliterative "Morte Arthure." Use of the English language contributed to…
Hanning, Robert W.
Leonard Michael Koff and Brenda Deen Schildgen, eds. The Decameron and the Canterbury Tales: New Essays on an Old Question (Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2000), pp. 177-211.
Both The Man of Law's Tale and Decameron 1.1 consider the problematics of mediation inherent in the use of language. MLT is an exercise for the teller to impress the other pilgrims with his authority and wisdom.
Davis, Kathleen.
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, ed. The Postcolonial Middle Ages (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000), pp. 105-22.
Contemporary orientalism is based on a paradoxical notion of the Middle Ages as both the precursor of modernity and an unchanging alterity. Davis identifies this paradox in Edward Said's "Orientalism" and Diane Sawyer's television documentary,…
Barefield, Laura (D.)
Medieval Perspectives 15.1: 27-34, 2000.
In a deliberate move to fit Constance of MLT to the genre of "hagiographic romance," Chaucer minimizes or eliminates the network of genealogical relations that gives the heroine significance and agency in Trevet's "Les cronicles," Chaucer's source.
Jost, Jean E.
Publications of the Medieval Association of the Midwest 7: 108-25, 2000.
Characterizes the Prioress of GP and PrT as "psychologically androgynous," a combination of "feminine on the outside" and "masculine on the inside." This combination is evident in the Prioress's fusion of sentimentality and cruelty and her other…
Assesses the six oaths by saints--Martyn, Denys, Peter, Yves, Austyn, and Jame--in ShT, arguing that familiarity with details of the saints' lives provokes the audience to condemn the characters in the Tale.
Beidler, Peter G.
Leonard Michael Koff and Brenda Deen Schildgen, eds. The Decameron and the Canterbury Tales: New Essays on an Old Question (Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2000), pp. 25-46.
Argues that Boccaccio's Decameron 8.1 was Chaucer's primary source for ShT, even though scholars have been reluctant to treat Decameron as a source for any of The Canterbury Tales. Posits definitions of source, hard analogue, and soft analogue.
Sturges, Robert S.
New York : St. Martin's Press, 2000.
Examines the Pardoner as an example of the "fixities and fluidities of fourteenth-century discourses about gender." Potentially subversive, the Pardoner is also a patriarchal figure and "anxious to assume the signs of a phallic and authoritative…
Sammel, Rebecca E.
Beate Müller, ed. Parody: Dimensions and Perspectives. Rodopi Perspectives in Modern Literature, no. 19 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997), pp. 169-90.
In its carnivalized parody of the sacrament of confession, the "calculated self-portrait" of the Archpoet's "Estuans intrinsecus" foreshadows PardPT. Each speaker creates a "mythopoeia of self" by manipulating sacred topoi; the Pardoner draw his…
Reed, Shannon L.
Journal x: A Journal in Culture and Criticism 5:109-16, 2000-2001.
Assesses critical responses to the Host's verbal assault on the Pardoner at the end of PardT, identifying the common assumption that the Host fears the Pardoner's sexuality. Such readings are complicitous in the "abjection" of the Pardoner and…
Piraprez, Delphine.
Le beau et le laid au Moyen Âge. Sénéfiance, no. 43 (Aix-en-Provence: Université de Provence, Centre Universitaire d'Etudes et de Recherches Médiévales d'Aix, 2000), pp. 423-35.
Considers the relationships between moral virtue/vice and physical beauty/ugliness in PardPT, focusing on the Old Man and the Pardoner.
Myers, Jeffrey Rayner.
Studia Neophilologica 72: 54-62, 2000.
The Pardoner is not a male homosexual but a cross-dressed female through whom Chaucer reveals the constricting gender roles available to women of his time. PardPT metaphorizes the social relations forced on a female trapped in the ambivalence of…
Hicks, James E.
Essays in Medieval Studies 3: 78-98, 1986.
In PardPT, Chaucer inverts three major precepts of Augustinian sermon rhetoric ("De Doctrina Christiana"): the preacher must pray before preaching, the preacher must maintain a grave and appropriate demeanor, and the preacher must maintain Christian…
Boenig, Robert.
ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes, and Reviews 13.4: 9-15, 2000.
Examines the almost ubiquitous assumption that hypocrisy is reflected in PardPT and suggests an alternative reading in which the Pardoner's words do not reveal his morality but parody WBPT.
Welsh, Andrew.
Robert Boenig and Kathleen Davis, eds. Manuscript, Narrative, Lexicon: Essays on Literary and Cultural Transmission in Honor of Whitney F. Bolton (Lewisburg, Penn.: Bucknell University Press; and London: Associated University Presses, 2000), pp. 76-95.
Examines how narrative and sententiousness interact in The Physician's Tale and The Manciple's Tale as examples of Chaucer's explorations of the nature of this interaction. PhyT is a "story in search of a moral," while ManT is a "collection of…
Snell, William.
Hiyoshi Review of English Studies (Keio University) 37: 117-36, 2000.
Argues that critical interpretations of Chaucer's Physician as a quack have been based on the moral outrage and stock literary character of a later age.
PhyT is concerned with texts, whether "historical" or the "fable." Virginia is compared to a text--a "book"--and the concerns with governance and authority in the Tale pertain to interpretation.
Brewer, Derek.
A. E. Christa Canitz and Gernot R. Wieland, eds. From Arabye to Engelond: Medieval Studies in Honour of Mahmoud Manzalaoui on His 75th Birthday (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1999), pp. 75-92.
Surveys medieval and modern understandings of honor as background to discussing the concept in "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," Malory's "Le Morte Darthur," and PhyT. Virginius "rightly kills" Virginia "to protect his own honour as well as her…
Sweeney, Michelle.
Dublin : Four Courts Press, 2000.
Magic enables discussion of contemporary political and social issues and timeless questions of faith, love, loyalty, fate, and destiny. The concluding chapter shows how magic in FranT enables discussion of free will and challenges the Franklin's…
