Getty, Laura Joanne.
Dissertation Abstracts International 60: 2503A, 1999.
Study of extant manuscripts from fourteenth-century England reveals that Chaucer was familiar with Ovidian texts and commentaries of his time. He developed his own adaptation of tone and vocabulary, exploring the tension between courtly love and…
Feimer, Joel.
John M. Hill and Deborah M. Sinnreich-Levi, eds. The Rhetorical Poetics of the Middle Ages: Reconstructive Polyphony. Essays in Honor of Robert O. Payne (Madison, N.J., and London: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press and Associated University Presses, 2000), pp. 88-105.
Although the narrator's intention in LGW is to praise his heroines for their "trouthe in love," his naiveté leads to an ironic representation of feminine ideals and, ultimately, an underlying antifeminism.
Dor, Juliette.
Myriam Watthe-Delmotte and Paul-Augustin Deproost, eds. Imaginaires du mal. Bibliothèque de la Faculté de Philosophie et Lettres: Transversalités, no. 1 (Paris: Cerf; and Louvain-la-Neuve: Université Catholique de Louvain, 2000), pp.79-89.
Examines the ironies of LGW and LGWP, observing tensions between Cupid's binary claims and the dialogical voices and approaches in the tales themselves. Mythological allusions and various plays suggest a cycle of fertility at odds with binary…
Crowley, James Patrick.
Dissertation Abstracts International 61: 602A, 1999.
Although many editors and critics of medieval literature assume a single authoritative text, literary authority may be diffuse. Crowley examines in detail the B and C versions of "Piers Plowman." Also treats the frame of Gower's "Confessio Amantis"…
Canitz, A. E. Christa.
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. 131-53.
Argues that LGW critiques the rigidity of highly conventionalized literary genres for failing to represent human experience adequately. Chaucer's conflation of hagiography, courtly romance, and epic myth reveals the "flaws" in each genre, especially…
Aloni, Gila.
Paris : Publications de l'Association des Médiévistes Anglicistes de l'Enseignement Supérieur, 2000.
Preface by André Crépin. In his representation of gender in its relation to power in LGW, Chaucer departs from the conservative social and literary norms of his age while appearing to adhere to those norms. Chaucer undercuts his overt…
Schoeck, Richard J.
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. 97-106.
Explores various kinds of game or play in TC: rhetorical games, war games, courtly games, and the games of life. Suggests Troilus may be seen as homo ludens (man playing).
Obst, Wolfgang, and Florian Schleburg.
Heidelberg : C. Winter, 1999.
Includes twelve chapters, organized as follows: a passage from TC (usually 100 lines each from MS Cambridge Corpus Christi 61) is followed by a discussion of specific grammatical or phonological features. Thus, chapter one contains the first night…
Nakao, Yoshiyuki.
Hisao Tsuru, ed. Fiction and Truth: Essays on Fourteenth-Century English Literature (Tokyo: Kirihara Shoten, 2000), pp. 133-44.
Assessing the punctuation in editions by Baugh, Donaldson, Fisher, Howard, Pollard, Robinson, Root, Skeat, and Windeatt, Nakao suggests that editorial punctuation of TC obscures another voice of Crisyede.
Minnis, Alastair, and Eric J. Johnson.
Jocelyn Wogan-Browne et al., eds. Medieval Women: Texts and Contexts in Late Medieval Britain: Essays for Felicity Riddy (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2000), pp. 199-216.
Assesses Criseyde's fearfulness in the context of "late-medieval accounts of the psychology and ethics of fear," arguing that Chaucer presents her not as a "culpably fickle female" but as an (equally essentialized) "attractively fearful female."
Considers how "history becomes the unconscious of romance" in TC. Criseyde is pronounced dead at the opening of the work (1.56) but does not die in the story; as a "symptom of the poem's disavowal of history and materiality, she also marks its…
Mapstone, Sally.
Jocelyn Wogan-Browne et al., eds. Medieval Women: Texts and Contexts in Late Medieval Britain: Essays for Felicity Riddy (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2000), pp. 131-47.
Although the love affair between Criseyde and Troilus is a medieval invention, Criseyde had a significant literary ancestry. In Latin versions of the Iliad, in Ovid's Heroides and Ars amatoria, and in the later romance tradition,…
Lundberg, Patricia Lorimer.
Essays in Medieval Studies 3: 34-59, 1986.
Argues that Chaucer depicts an idealized earthly love in books 1-3 of TC, an expedient pseudolove in Criseyde's relationship with Diomede, and a transcendent love in Troilus's continuing love for Criseyde.
Kobayashi, Yoshiko.
Dissertation Abstracts International 58: 3144A, 1997.
Like Gower in "Confessio Amantis," Chaucer in TC adapts two strategies from Benot de Sainte-Maure's "Roman de Troie" to criticize chivalry: indicating how chivalry oppresses women and revealing the incompatibility of knightly conduct and good…
Kaylor, Noel Harold, (Jr.)
Medieval English Studies 8: 95-114, 2000.
Relates the structure of TC (with Troilus's happiness reaching its apex at the numerical center of the poem) to structures found in Dante's "Commedia" (Divine Comedy) and to themes of fortune's changes in Boethius's "Consolation of Philosophy."
Johnson, Ian.
Carmina Philosophiae 3 (1994): 1-21, 1994.
Compares Troilus's speech on free will and predestination (TC 4) with John Walton's poetic exposition of the source passage in Boethius 5, prose 3. Aware of TC, Walton "competes" with Chaucer and better succeeds in clearly rendering the nuances of…
Hayton, Heather Richardson.
Dissertation Abstracts International 61: 1393A, 2000.
Analyzes two works each from late-thirteenth-century Florence and late-fourteenth-century England in relation to the "Roman de la rose" as expressions of political factionalism in the vocabulary of desire. Concludes that "a loyal citizen is still a…
Doyle, Kara Ann.
Dissertation Abstracts International 61: 2293A, 2000.
Medieval male authors, anticipating female resistance to their treatments of Criseyde, often represented her as an example of natural feminine fickleness, leading women to accept this negative view. Doyle examines masculine treatments of Criseyde,…
Chaucer manipulates names in the TC to add nuance to the individual characters and to make clear their subtle relationships. Although "Pandare" is used first, for example, the name "Pandarus" relates to "Troilus" and implies the insinuation of the…
Close reading of three passages on Troilus's suffering (5.218-38, 540-53, 1674-1722) reveals an intensification of emotion through "rhetorical figures of compression and repetition and by cascades of rhyme sounds within the rhyme royal forms." The…
Astell, Ann W.
Carmina Philosophiae 3: 23-36, 1994.
Argues that Boethius's "Consolation" inspired many "amatory imitations" (especially the "Roman de la Rose" and TC) because its opening scene parallels--and perhaps helped inspire--the visual commonplace of the (love)sick man tended by a female who…
Critics of "The Floure and the Leafe" respond less to the text than to its critical history. Detraction by W. W. Skeat and other members of the Chaucer Society is compensation for earlier praise of the work by Dryden, Pope, Keats, and others.
As the first printer to collect Chaucer's works, Pynson has been accused of "inflating" and "contaminating" Chaucer's canon. But the concept of an author's "complete works" did not solidify until the nineteenth century. Pynson used Chaucer's name to…
