Laird, Edgar, and Robert Fischer, trans.
Binghamton, N.Y. : Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1995.
Facing-page (French-English) translation of the earliest French treatise on the astrolabe (1362), a work that shares the same source as Astr. The introduction assesses the relations among Pélerin's "Practique," Astr, and their source text, John of…
Laird, Edgar (S.)
Thomas A. Prendergast and Barbara Kline, eds. Rewriting Chaucer: Culture, Authority, and the Idea of the Authentic Text, 1400-1602 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1999), pp. 145-65.
The status of Astr as an unfinished scientific treatise encouraged its manuscript compilators to finish or add to it in a number of ways: responding to the descriptive prologue included by Chaucer, adding to or reordering its materials, and placing…
Craig, Lisa Renee.
Dissertation Abstracts International 60: 1119A, 1999.
In this study of a specialized kind of computer manual, Chaucer's Astr is cited as a prototype and analyzed for its use of three characteristic rhetorical features.
Asahata, Syozo.
Hisayuki Sasamoto et al., eds. Hearts to the English-American Language and Literature: Essays Presented to Emeritus Professor Sutezo Hirose in Honour of His 88th Birthday (Osaka: Osaka Kyoiku Tosho, 1999), pp. 239-53 (in Japanese).
Surveys the reception of Astr in Japan and describes the former Marquess of Bute MS 13 (A.19) purchased from H. P. Kraus, New York, at an unspecified date.
Thebes's foundational perversion (Jove's rape of Europa) establishes a recursive pattern of love and violence. Creon's dynastic expectation for Anelida and Arcite results in Anelida's self-deception and leads as well to Arcite's servitude to his new…
Wolfe, Matthew C.
Chaucer Review 33: 427-31, 1999.
It is possible that Ret was written as a general work, found among the papers and drafts of CT, and then put at the end of that work by scribes and early editors. If thought to apply to Chaucer's entire corpus, Ret broadens our view of the poet as a…
Choi, Yejung.
Medieval English Studies 7: 149-75, 1999.
In LGW, if the God of Love and Alceste criticize Chaucer, they do so as representatives of a text community based on Augustinian hermeneutics. Chaucer undermines the legitimacy of their view of poetry, inscribing his own presence and intent in the…
Aloni, Gila.
Rhetoric Society Quarterly 29.3: 31-43, 1999.
Argues that in the LGW account of Lucrece (a tale of enforced copulation), Chaucer uses the word "myght" as a noun, a verb, and a copula to suggest the ultimate triumph of the heroine's seductive rhetoric. The story is less about rape than about…
Aloni, Gila.
Bulletin des Anglicistes Medievistes 56: 45-57, 1999.
Assesses similarities and differences between the two Prologues to LGW and the portrayal of Cupid in the Dido account, examining the power relations between Cupid and Alceste and, beyond this microstructure, the masculine-feminine relations of the…
To find his own poetic voice, Chaucer's dreamer in HF impersonates the non-canonical subjectivities and voices of women and animals in the form of Dido, the eagle, and the monster-woman Fame. By doing so, he turns away from masculine literary…
Twelve chapters assess why so many poets have been drawn to Ovid's Metamorphoses as a source of inspiration. Although its intrinsic richness and complexity provided the original impetus for its popularity, its permeation of so much English literature…
Yvernault-Gamaury, Martine.
Colette Stévanovitch, ed. L'Articulation langue-littérature dans les textes médiévaux anglais, II. Actes du colloque des 25 et 26 juin 1999 á l'Université de Nancy II. Collection GRENDEL, no. 3. (Nancy: Publications de l'Association des Médiévistes Anglicistes de l'Enseignement Supérieur, 1999), pp. 175-92.
Though BD is highly structured, ambiguity pervades it, raising questions about the relationships between dreaming and writing, illusory experience and textual reality, and psychological emptiness and poetic fruition.
Chaucer's reference to "ferses twelve" in BD remains a tantalizing problem. He may have been thinking of a non-standard version of chess, such as the Courier game, which includes twelve pawns; or the narrator may be thinking of draughts. In any case,…
Kruger, Steven (F.)
Peter Brown, ed. Reading Dreams: The Interpretation of Dreams from Chaucer to Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 51-83.
Traces the influence of medieval medical texts on the understanding of the bodily causes of dreaming, arguing that the dreamer's body plays an important role in dreams. In BD, the dream works to masculinize and "heterosexualize" the ailing narrator,…
Fradenburg, Louise O.
South Atlantic Quarterly 98: 563-92, 1999.
Using Freudian and Lacanian analysis, examines BD, ultimately "suggest[ing] that Chaucer used courtly love and the figure of Fortune to develop a poetics of tragic interiority that was decisive for the artificing of 'life' in subsequent periods."
Bevan, E. Dean.
Ulrich Müller and Kathleen Verduin, eds. Papers from the Fifth Annual General Conference on Medievalism 1990 (Göppingen: Kümmerle, 1996), pp. 435-41.
Comments on Bevan's efforts to represent in a film script various aspects of Chaucer's art in TC: Chaucer's sense of history, the subtleties of his diction, and his "world view."
Assesses the Proem to Boccaccio's Il Filostrato as a source for TC: the artist's "dual-self of helpless lover and ingenious artist" is split between Troilus and Pandarus, and Boccaccio's two ladies, Filomena and Criseis, "are first merged and later…
Takada, Yasunari.
Piero Boitani and Anna Torti, eds. The Body and the Soul in Medieval Literature (Woodbridge, Suffolk; Rochester, N.Y.: D. S. Brewer, 1999), pp. 107-21.
Argues that Jürgen Habermas's concept of the "public sphere" shares features with Chaucer's notion of "commune profit" in PF. Both concepts suggest or insist that the political body must be open and generative, cognizant of the physical as well as…
Lynch, Kathryn L.
Kathleen Coyne Kelly and Marin Leslie, eds. Menacing Virgins: Representing Virginity in the Middle Ages and Renaissance (Newark: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses), 1999, pp. 83-96.
PF represents an "oedipal moment"--a psychological suspension between the "male-dominated civilization of Africanus ('culture,' in a word)" and the "female-dominated love-garden of Nature and Venus ('nature')." The narrator stands "on the brink of…
PF is an epithalamium. Epithalamia are not always occasioned by human marriages; they do affirm the heavenly benediction and public recognition of marriage and celebrate the cycle of procreation; they contain "fescennine" verses, which poke fun at…
This line from PF has been taken to mean that the "stare" (magpie) divulges secrets, or betrays. However, "bewrye" can also mean "cover up," suggesting that the bird knows "how to keep a secret." Such a nuance could also apply to TC; Troilus's…
Saunders, Corinne J.
Susan Deacy and Karen F. Pierce, eds. Rape in Antiquity (London: Duckworth, in association with The Classical Press of Wales, 1997), pp. 243-66
Assesses medieval literary representations of rape in light of law, medicine, and theology. Reads Chaucer's account of Lucretia in LGW as a challenge to Augustine's admonitions against suicide, and the account of Philomela as proto-feminist. Compares…
Meale, Carol M.
Geoffrey Lester, ed. Chaucer in Perspective: Middle English Essays in Honour of Norman Blake (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1999), pp. 118-38
Analyzes evidence of readership found in fifteenth-century copies of LGW, including its placement in anthologies, poems with which it is associated, and evidence of female names in LGW manuscripts. Infrequently excerpted, the poem was seldom mined…
Marchand, Yvette Marie.
Piero Boitani and Anna Torti, eds. The Body and the Soul in Medieval Literature (Woodbridge, Suffolk; Rochester, N.Y.: D. S. Brewer, 1999), pp. 123-44.
Traces the development of body-soul relations in Western intellectual tradition as they are reflected in LGW, in book 1 of Edmund Spenser's "Faerie Queene," and in Richard Burton's "Anatomy of Melancholy." Uses St. Augustine as a point of departure…
Burnley, David.
Geoffrey Lester, ed. Chaucer in Perspective: Middle English Essays in Honour of Norman Blake (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1999), pp. 28-46.
Reassesses details of Chaucer's Scog and of Scogan's Moral Balade in light of their historical context, intertextual relations, manuscript variants, and scribal graffiti, arguing that Scogan's poem reflects familiarity with several of Chaucer's…
