Olson, Donald W., Edgar S. Laird, and Thomas E. Lytle.
Sky and Telescope 99.4: 44-49, 2000.
Correlates the disappearance of the rocks in FranT to an extremely high tide that occurred on December 19, 1340, perhaps the year of Chaucer's birth. Calculates the date using the Toledan or Alfonsine Tables known to Chaucer. The clerk in FranT knows…
Posits FranT as a major source for Shakespeare play, focusing on similarities between the two magicians. Revised version published as "Deceiving Appearances: Neo-Chaucerian Magic in 'The Tempest'," in Hillman's Intertextuality and Romance in…
Edwards, Robert R.
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. 226-46.
Both Boccaccio in Decameron and Chaucer in FranT rewrite the story of Menedon from Filocolo, and both investigate whether social worth is dependent on lineage or character. While Boccaccio emphasizes the new urban nontraditional man, Chaucer attempts…
FranT is about people's vulnerability to themselves, about the intimate connection between their identities--or senses of self--and their bodies, about how this vulnerability compromises moral strength and capacity for spiritual fulfillment, and…
Mehl, Dieter.
Archiv für das Studium der Neueren Sprachen und Literaturen 237: 133-38, 2000.
Establishes the authenticity of Shakespeare's "A Lover's Complaint" and suggests that the female falcon's complaint in SqT is a possible analogue. Both laments belong to the complaint tradition.
Although modern readers read SqT as parody, such a reading would have seemed "preposterous" to pre-eighteenth-century readers, who were concerned with sententiae. Pairing tales, pouring over large sections of text, and engaging in self-reflections…
Discussion of Anglo-Norman fabliaux and their Latin antecedents. Elements of Anglo-Norman fabliaux are found in MerT, while MilT, RvT, and ShT follow Continental French fabliaux. Assessments of Anglo-Norman fabliaux are needed.
Wright, Constance S.
Constance S. Wright and Julia Bolton Holloway, eds. Tales Within Tales: Apuleius Through Time: Essays in Honor of Professor Emeritus Richard J. Schoeck (New York: AMS Press, 2000), pp. 55-72.
Compares depictions of Cupid and Psyche in Plato's Phaedrus, Apuleius's Metamorphoses, Origen's Commentary on the Song of Songs, and ClT (Walter and Griselda), noting their different constructions of gender and viewing them as reflections of…
Christine de Pizan's version of the Griselda story emphasizes the gaze theme less than the versions by Chaucer and Petrarch do. Pizan's version is more clearly feminist than ClT, which presents a male viewpoint addressed to a community of male…
Following the medieval rhetorical analysis that sees irony as a form of allegory, Beall finds that both CYT and PardT deal with the "supreme alchemy" (material alchemy in CYT, rhetorical alchemy in PardT) by which the profane is transformed into the…
Summit, Jennifer.
Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 30: 211-46, 2000.
Petrarch's "Letter to Colonna," twelfth-century handbooks for travelers and pilgrims, and SNT exhibit a characteristically medieval historiography that displaces a model of loss and recovery with one representing historical difference through spatial…
Hirsh, John C.
English Language Notes 37.4: 1-8, 2000.
Chaucer's many references to Rome in CT reflect an interest that originated in a visit there. In particular, classical associations and the decoration of Santa Cecilia in Trastevere illuminate the style and meaning of SNT. A visit to Rome may have…
Wheatley, Edward.
Gainesville : University Press of Florida, 2000.
Surveys the use of Latin beast fables in medieval schools and the legacy of this material in the works of late-medieval authors who were educated in the tradition and who wrote in English. Focuses on fables associated with the legendary Roman emperor…
Hazell, Dinah.
Dissertation Abstracts International 60: 4003A, 1999.
Source study of "Ywain and Gawain," "Sir Launfal," and NPT that explores how the process of appropriation reflects social, economic, political, and ideological continuities and transformations.
As found in "The Golden Legend" ("Legende Aurea") and the "South English Legendary," the life of St. Kenelm offers striking parallels with both PrT and NPT, in which Chaucer refers to it (7.3110-21). Kenelm was murdered at age seven, perhaps the…
Saito, Isamu.
Hisao Tsuru, ed. Fiction and Truth: Essays on Fourteenth-Century English Literature (Tokyo: Kirihara Shoten, 2000), pp. 61-78 (in Japanese), pp. 61-78.
Explores the double meanings of "outrider," "venerie," and "prikasour," focusing on the Monk in The General Prologue.
Pinti, Daniel J.
Comparative Literature Studies 37: 277-97, 2000.
Medieval commentaries on the "Commedia" (Divine Comedy) inform our understanding of how Chaucer read Dante. In the Hugolino episode of MkT, with its reference to Dante, Chaucer simultaneously authorizes "Inferno" 33 and destabilizes it, exemplifying…
Neuse, Richard.
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 22: 415-23, 2000.
The tragedies of MkT resist any overarching "metahistorical paradigm" and thus reflect Jean-Francois Lyotard's definition of postmodernism. The Monk is a "serious-minded humanist with a bent toward postmodernism."
Neuse, Richard.
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 247-77.
As KnT is a reduction of the Teseida, MkT is a miniature imitation of Boccaccio's "De casibus virorum illustrium." The Monk, Boccaccio's ironic double, interrogates newly emergent forms of tragedy and contests with the other pilgrims within the…
Knight, Stephen.
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 22: 381-86, 2000.
Recurrent concern with lordship in MkT and in the GP sketch of the Monk reveals the Monk's pretense to knightly status, a case of estate transgression.
Kelly, Henry Ansgar.
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 22: 407-14, 2000.
Chaucer invented the "De casibus" tragedy and assigned his tragedies to the Monk only after he had abandoned his "original serious attitude" toward them. Kelly comments on the place of MkT in Chaucer's sequence of composition.
Jacobus, Lee A.
Kristin Pruitt McColgan and Charles W. Durham, eds. Arenas of Conflict: Milton and the Unfettered Mind. (Selinsgrove, Penn.: Susquehanna University Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1997), pp. 261-70.
Compares Milton's portrayal of Dalila in "Samson Agonistes" with earlier representations by Boccaccio, Chaucer, Lydgate, and Swetnam. Chaucer offers no analysis of her motives; Milton condemns her actions, not her gender.
