Turner, Marie.
In The Open Access Companion to the Canterbury Tales. https://opencanterburytales.dsl.lsu.edu, 2017. Relocated 2025 at https://opencanterburytales.lsusites.org/
Describes the generic features of the fabliau, and explores how and what extent the MerT fulfills and overturns these features in its plot, diction, biblical allusion, and courtly conventions, also commenting on interpolations in two manuscripts.…
Whitaker, Cord J.
In The Open Access Companion to the Canterbury Tales. https://opencanterburytales.dsl.lsu.edu, 2017. Relocated 2025 at https://opencanterburytales.lsusites.org/
Treats geography, lineal descent, and "religious and political difference" as racial markers in MLT and its analogues, suggesting that skin color "lurks in the shadows." Designed for pedagogical use, includes several exercises and questions for…
Zarins, Kim.
In The Open Access Companion to the Canterbury Tales. https://opencanterburytales.dsl.lsu.edu, 2017. Relocated 2025 at https://opencanterburytales.lsusites.org/
Cautions that what we say about the Pardoner's body "might say something about ourselves"; summarizes critical discussion of the Pardoner's sex, sexuality, and rhetoric; and comments on the Old Man, Death (compared to Terry Pratchett's Mort), the…
Defines and describes the social and rhetorical emphases that characterize the persona and poetic "common voice" of late-medieval English "public poetry," exemplified here most extensively in analyses of Langland's "Piers Plowman" and Gower's…
Assesses the inclusion in the mid-1500s of "The Plowman's Tale" in Chaucer's "Workes" and its effects in reading reception and influence on beast fable throughout the sixteenth century.
Irvin, Matthew W.
Studies in the Age Chaucer 40 (2018): 113-53.
Connects "The Prologue and Tale of Beryn" (PTB) with the London Company of Mercers that met at St. Thomas Acon, suggesting that PTB was composed on the occasion of their feast in 1428 or 1430, exploring connections of the poem with John Carpenter,…
Ellison, Darryl William.
Dissertation Abstracts International A75.07 (2015): n.p.
Investigates the role of Chaucerian apocrypha and adaptations in defining "Chaucerian," a concept "that was as much a product of Chaucer's later editors, adapters, and imitators as it was a product of his contemporaries and predecessors." Considers…
Stadnik, Katarzyna.
In Przemysław Łozowski and Katarzyna Stadnik, eds. Visions and Revisions: Studies in Theoretical and Applied Linguistics (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 2016), pp. 179-86.
Uses the Boethian imagery of Fortune and her wheel in For and Truth to clarify "situated cognition," exemplifying how visual images can enable cultural transmission across time.
Goldstein, R. James.
Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2017.
Offers instruction on how to read "older poetry" rhetorically, with emphasis on conventional forms and subgenres of lyric verse, and using the scansion system of Derek Attridge (1982). Chapter 4, "The Love Complaint Ballade: Chaucer to Wyatt" (pp.…
Dauphant, Clothilde.
In Miren Lacassagne, ed. Le rayonnement de la cour des premiers Valois à l'époque d'Eustache Deschamps (Paris: Presses de l'Université Paris-Sorbonne, 2017), pp. 81-94.
Traces changes in the putatively fixed form of the balade as used by Eustache Deschamps, John Gower, Chaucer, and others, commenting on variations in number of stanzas, rhyme schemes, the inclusion of envoys, etc. Includes comments on Ven, For, Ros,…
Watt, Caitlin G.
Dissertation Abstracts International A79.11 (2018): n.p.
Assesses Antigone and Cassandra in TC--characters who are themselves "literary creators"--to explore meta-level consideration of reader identification and authorial status.
Megna, Paul.
In Russell Sbriglia, ed. Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Literature but Were Afraid to Ask Žižek (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2017), pp. 267-89.
Uses Slavoj Žižek's analysis of privilege and courtly love to assess the major characters of TC: the "servile aggression" of the narrator; Pandarus's "patriarchal privilege"; Crisyede's "ethically heroic" decisions about loving her husband,…
Mack, Peter.
In Rhetoric's Questions: Reading and Interpretation (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), pp. 7-18.
Explores questions of audience, occasion, and a writer's control in classical and early modern western rhetoric, and applies these questions in a "sample reading," examining TC, 3.1324–36 for the ways that it encourages readers "to re-experience…
Argues that Chaucer perceives a tension in Boethius's "Consolation of Philosophy" regarding the role of romantic love in the relation of this world to the divine. Chaucer envisages a version of romantic love that is a bridge between this world and…
Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome, and Linda T. Elkins-Tanton.
New York: Bloomsbury, 2017.
An edited epistolary exchange between medievalist Cohen and physical scientist Elkins-Tanton, exploring humanist and scientific perspectives on epistemology, point of view, temporality, beauty, and human comprehension of the earth and the cosmos.…
Barootes, B. S. W.
Chaucer Review 53.1 (2018): 102-11.
Examines the use of final -"e" in the fourth stanza of Book II of TC, and the ways in which early copyists paid attention to Chaucer's use of the letter.
Item not seen. Online information indicates that this volume addresses questions about why Chaucer included his legend of Cleopatra in LGW, his sources for the account, and its success as a poem.
Argues that Chaucer's claim in LGW that St. Augustine "hath gret compassioun / Of this Lucresse" is neither ironic nor misinformed, but is an accurate account of Augustine's position. Situating Augustine's comments about Lucretia within the broader…
Arner, Timothy.
Comparative Literature 69.2 (2017): 160-80.
Shows that Lucan's "Bellum civile," the medieval "accessus" tradition, and "vitae Lucani" together depict the Roman poet as a "violated female," victimized by his "tyrannical emperor," and abruptly silenced, arguing that this legacy influenced LGW…
Keller, Wolfram R.
In Jacomien Prins and Maude Vanhaelen, eds. Sing Aloud Harmonious Spheres: Renaissance Conceptions of Cosmic Harmony (New York: Routledge, 2017), pp. 80-98.
Notes that Chaucer "uses musical references and metaphors in his poetry in order to discuss the art of writing poetry itself," and argues that in HF--and even in PF--Chaucer advances a "poetics of noise." Summarizes the "reception of the…
Keller, Wolfram R.
In Claus Uhlig and Wolfram R. Keller, eds. Europa zwischen Antike und Moderne: Beiträge zur Philosophie, Literaturwissenschaft und Philologie (Heidelberg: Winter, 2014), pp. 99-124.
Examines Chaucer's depictions of music, poetry, sound, noise, cacophony, and harmony in PF; MilT; and, most extensively, HF, exploring how he adapted notions derived from Boethius's "Consolation of Philosophy" and his "De musica," medieval perception…
Johnstone, Boyda.
New Medieval Literatures 17 (2017): 175-200.
Analyzes the "effect and experience" of the stained glass in HF and in Lydgate's "underappreciated remobilization" of it in his "Temple of Glass," comparing the aesthetics of the dream visions with those of late medieval glass in England, its…
