Browse Items (16536 total)

Surveys "unreliable" information about Constantine Africanus in scholarly discussions of Chaucer's references to him in GP 1.433 (Doctour of Phisik) and MerT 4.1810-11. Then clarifies Constantinus's importance in the history of medicine, what is and…

Encourages editors to adopt the manuscript variant "his" (rather than "hir") at the end of the Cook's fragment (CkT 1.4422), which would indicate that the wife prostituted herself "not to make her own living, but in order to provide money for her…

Surveys the status of the complaint as a formal genre in classical and in medieval French, Provencal, Italian, and English traditions as background to discussing Chaucer's uses of the genre in BD, TC, Mars, and elsewhere. Focuses on Chaucer's…

Describes Chaucer's use of "Thise" in PardT 6.661 as a marker of stylistic transition--from the "rhetorical tirade" about sins to the "more intimate and often colloquial" tale of the rioters. The usage anticipates modern English.

Challenges psychoanalytic approaches to ClT and rejects the approaches that read the poem either as a Christian parable of authoritarianism or a rejection of authority as a "disease of monarchy." Argues that Chaucer creates the Tale as an expression…

Studies the origin and development of the Griselda story from the fourteenth through the twentieth century.

Resists editorial glossing of "cherles rebelling" (KnT 1.2459) as "an allusion to the Peasants' Revolt of 1381," offering other possibilities from commentaries on Saturn's astrological influence.

Verse retelling of selections from CT (all but Mel, SNPT, CYPT, ManPT, and ParsPT) with reduced plots, simplified rhetoric, and modernized English in ballad stanzas. Cuddington adapts the links to unify the selections, which are arranged in the…

Provides background on Chaucer and CT and emphasizes how each tale in CT addresses the particulars of the literary genre to which it is related. In Japanese.

Articulates a number of parallels and contrasts among the tellers and tales of KnT, MilT, RvT, and CkT, focusing on character, accident versus fate, intention, and paradox. Emphasizing the Knight's "chivalric idealism" and the "strong earthiness" of…

Interprets CT as a "compelling psychogram of a diverse community processing massive demographic shifts in the wake of recurrent epidemic waves." Explores disruptions of social and linguistic categories, PardT as an allegory of plague death, various…

Edition of KnT with modern English translation, pronunciation guide, and glossary.

Revised edition of the late Ichikawa's introduction to Chaucer's English (reprinted many times since 1934), with text on the left side and it pronunciation in IPA notation on the facing page with a Modern English prose translation underneath. Notes…

Reads "out of towne" in the GP description of the Miller's bag-piping as a play on "out of tune."

Exploring the "bukke and hare" of Th 7.756 for their "traditional attributes" rather than as suggestive game animals, documents that their associations with timidity and, reading "bukke" as "goat rather than "male deer," sexual pursuit.

Includes nine essays, plus a response, by various authors, with an index and an introduction by the editor. Argues for a reassessment of the critical relevance of BD, which has often been marginalized, as a work that is simultaneously "multilingual"…

Scans the verse in the first 100 lines of BD, with commentary on emendations and unusual features; then offers a catalog of scansion (with analysis and extensive notes) of the entire poem, concluding that the "basis of Chaucer's metrics" in BD (and…

Describes the French influences on BD of, among others, three poems by Machaut, one by Froissart, and Guillaume de Lorris's portion of the "Roman de la Rose," demonstrating the dependence and innovations of Chaucer's work in the tradition of the…

Shows how Biblical narratives underlie the CT, not only allusively but in narrative plots and figural schema, focusing on how materials from Genesis are present in GP (springtime creation), KnT (brotherly conflict similar to Cain and Abel), MilT…

Reads HF as Chaucer's "vindication of poetry," even though he comically proposes to eschew it. Identifies the various echoes of classical and medieval sources in HF, particularly Virgil's "Aeneid," Ovid's "Metamorphoses," Alain de Lille's…

A critical text of Bo, collated "with all medieval and late-medieval authorities and also with the modern critical editorial tradition." Includes a list of glosses and an extensive introduction, with a survey of interpretive responses to Bo.

Four essays and two appendices place Bo in the "tradition of the academic study and translation of the 'Consolatio,'" clarifying the relative importance of such predecessors as William of Conches, Jean de Meun, anonymous commentators, and especially…

Reveals similarities in the rhetorical strategies of the loathly lady in WBT and Lady Philosophy in Bo.

Observes that in sixteenth-century editions of CT, ManT follows NPT, and that after c. 1550 the pair is followed by the story of the Pelican and Griffin from the apocryphal "Plowman's Tale," then the references to fables in ParsP, providing a…

A pattern of Chaucerian poetics emerges through four themes--courtly love, morality, order, and poetry--found in his early poetry (BD, HF, and KnT). Starting as a poet of courtly love, Chaucer overcame limitations of this theme by analyzing its…