Keiper, Hugo,Richard J. Utz, Christophe Bode,eds.
Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1997.
Explores the correspondences between late-medieval, early modern, and contemporary critical and literary nominalism. For five essays that pertain to Chaucer, search for Nominalism and Literary Discourse under Alternative Title.
Keiper, Hugo.
Hugo Keiper, Richard J. Utz, and Cristoph Bode, eds. Nominalism and Literary Discourse: New Perspectives (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1997), pp. 1-85.
Reexamines the correspondences between literary nominalism and realism as competing paradigms and analyzes critical approaches to the literary debate on universals in late-medieval (especially Chaucerian) and early modern literary studies.
Justice, Steven, and Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, eds.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997.
Includes an introduction by Justice, five essays by various authors, and an edition and translation of the "autobiographical" passage in "Piers Plowman" (C-text, "passus" 5.1-104).
Jacobs, Nicholas.
A. J. Minnis, Charlotte C. Morse, and Thorlac Turville-Petre, eds. Essays on Ricardian Literature: In Honour of J. A. Burrow (Oxford: Clarenden, 1997), pp. 203-21.
The romances of Chaucer and of the "Gawain" poet are similar in treating the genre as a decaying or decadent form. Chaucer treats the genre and its traditional themes lightly, at times parodically, while the "Gawain" poet seeks to redeem the genre…
Huth, Jennifer Mary.
Dissertation Abstracts International 58 (1997): 159A.
Examines the rise of professionalism and women's efforts to achieve autonomy in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England as represented in the mystery cycles, Chaucer's Wife of Bath, and Margery Kempe.
Dreams in Chaucer function as authoritative texts within power structures. In PF, the systems represented by Affrycan and Nature protect authoritative knowledge and devalue individual experience. In TC, because knowledge and belief are interactive,…
Hudson, Anne.
Helen Cooper and Sally Mapstone, eds. The Long Fifteenth Century: Essays for Douglas Gray (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), pp. 313-29.
Describes how John Bales sought to preserve English literary tradition by cataloging it in his "Scriptorum illustrium maioris Brytanniae...Catalogus" (1557 and 1559). Comments on Bale's treatment of Chaucer in the "longest entry concerning a…
Howes, Laura L.
Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1997.
Examines gardens in Chaucer's narratives as a means to show how literary and social conventions impose constraints and provide opportunities for the poet and characters alike to react to conventions. Surveys literary and historical gardens with…
Horvath, Richard P.
Dissertation Abstracts International 57 (1997): 3287A.
Late-medieval English poets asserted their authorial identity in a commercial environment in various ways, including producing fascicles or pamphlets. Chaucer asserted his authorship through letters (Scog, Buk, and the letters in TC). Horvath also…
Assesses the "most important" poems about animals in English literature, ca. 700-1400 A.D., focusing on three traditions: "Physiologus," bird debates, and beast fable and epic. Considers PF as a bird debate, describing how it transcends the…
Twenty-three essyas by various authors delivered at the "Northeast Regional Meeting of the Conference on Christianity and Literature" 10-12 October 1996, topics ranging from medieval to modern. For two essays that pertain to Chaucer search for…
Gray, Douglas.
Proceedings of the British Academy 87 (1995): 67-99.
Surveys the art and rhetoric of scenes of sorrow or pity in Chaucer, Gower, Langland, Henryson, Malory, and others, arguing that Chaucer is "undoubtedly the master of the various modes of pathetic writing" in the period. Comments on scenes in KnT,…
Includes thirty-eight essays. For eight essays that pertain to Chaucer, search for Proceedings of the 9th International Conference of the Spanish Society for Medieval Language and Literature under Alternative Title.
Examines the evolution of the word "humanism" and explores Chaucer's artistic application of fourteenth-century nominalism as it relates to his fusion of medieval ideas of community, tradition, and the emerging figure of the individual. Treats CT,…
Evitt, Regula Meyer.
Monica Brzezinski Potkay and Regula Meyer Evitt. Minding the Body: Woman and Literature in the Middle Ages, 800-1500 (London: Twayne, 1997), (Chapter 8) pp. 139-65.
Himself accused of rape, Chaucer could inhabit the "role of masculine agent" of the crime and that of the "feminized victim of accusation," reworking the traditional "metaphoric equation of deceptive language and female infidelity."
An introduction to the influence of Christian thought and history on Old and Middle English literatures. A chapter on "Piers Plowman" and CT (pp. 101-38) surveys late-medieval ecclesiastical offices, the theology of salvation, penance and…
Dean, James M.
Cambridge, Mass.: Medieval Academy, 1997.
Surveys the "senectus mundi" topos in late-medieval literature, particularly in Latin, French, and English literature, from Jean de Meun to Chaucer. Separate chapters address the topos, Middle English historical writing, Jean de Meun, Dante, "Piers…
Dahlberg, Mary Margaret.
Dissertation Abstracts International 58 (1997): 155A.
Free indirect discourse appears in TC and in works by John Lyly and George Gascoigne primarily for dramatic effects. Multiple voices in free indirect discourse may also mimic, distance, and achieve irony, as in many novels of the nineteenth and…
Craun, Edwin D.
Cambridge: Cambridge Univeristy Press, 1997.
Draws from thirteenth-century pastoral literature (much of it in manuscript) that treats "Sins of the Tongue" to demonstrate how a pastoral "speech code" was "woven into late medieval [literary] texts." Chapters 1 and 2 distinguish in the pastoral…
Cox, Catherine S.
Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1997.
A study of "the interconnectedness of gender, epistemology, and poetics in Chaucer's texts," focusing on "idioms of gender that attend narrative protocols of reflexitivity and appropriation." Examines the linguistic, discursive, and sexual…
Courtenay, William J.
Keiper, Hugo, Richard J. Utz, and Cristoph Bode, eds. Nominalism and Literary Discourse: New Perspectives (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1997), pp. 111-21.
Surveys the history and state of scholarship on a key concept of fourteenth-century nominalism--the dialectic of divine omnipotence--and its applications to Chaucerian and other Middle English texts. Warns that a view of the "potentia absoluta" as…
