Browse Items (16472 total)

Cambridge MS Dd.4.24 contains a unique version of WBP: it adds five antifeminist passages and renumbers the Wife's husbands, making that section more organized and coherent. It is not possible to determine whether these changes were the work of…

The old hag's curtain lecture, which changes the knight from selfish to selfless, is made possible through the romance genre. The silence of the knight signifies "radical freedom," not the end of an "authentic personality."

By adding forty-five lines in "quasi-Langlandian" alliterative personification allegory to CkT, the Bodley scribe creates a second distinctive narrative voice that competes with Chaucer's own. The deliberate moral ending "governs" both Perykn and…

Though Capgrave's "Life of St. Katherine" does not mention Chaucer or his characters and does not quote from Chaucer's texts, it bears a marked similarity to the technique of TC. Capgrave seems interested in issues raised by Chaucer but not, like…

Two recently identified Trinity College manuscripts written by the "Hammond" scribe (who worked in London ca. 1460-85), a prolific copier of Chaucer, contain medical, scientific, and legal materials, indicating that this scribe included among his…

Based on medieval religious rules and regulations, particularly those related to orders of nuns, the medieval norm of nuns is revealed in Chaucer's depiction of the Prioress, a depiction that is not negative.

Dorigen's home is in "lower" Brittany around Carnac and the Locmariaquer peninsula, an area replete with menhirs and dolmens. These megalithic pagan structures are the "grisly rokkes blake," and Dorigen's fear of them is both physical and spiritual.

Aurelius usurps and reinterprets Dorigen's speech. Through such devices, Chaucer subtly makes listeners and readers aware that what may appear to be real, whether concrete or ideological, may be illusion. The Franklin's intent is to assert his…

The multiple voices in "Complaint of Mars" mask the identity of the real lyric subject. An examination of these voices reveals that the real lyric subject is the reader, who discovers that he or she is not, like Mars, an autonomous self.

In CT, generally, and in MLT, FrT, PhyT, PardT, and PrT, specifically, devils act as agents of God to tempt evildoers. Although they fail, evildoers in CT are armed with the God-given ability to avoid such temptation through their reason,…

Chaucer's knowledge of medieval mathematical imagery is evident in several ways, beginning with his reference to "Argus, the noble countour," who is Algus, the great Arab mathematician Al-Khwarizmi. By refiguring the beginnings and endings of…

Episodes in the first part of WBT parallel events in the second. This "step parallelism structure" reveals a "pattern of attenuation" that emphasizes the development of the knight, who becomes less impulsive and more reflective through the course of…

The influence of Lydgate's "Troy Book" on Metham's work is often cited by critics. However, in terms of scene and tone, Metham is more indebted to Chaucer's TC and "Legend of Thisbe" (LGW) than to Lydgate.

The word "hoom," appearing numerous times in FranT, changes according to the character with whom it is associated. This is especially true of Dorigen, whose "hoom" reflects her most moral self.

Considers Chaucer's two tales set in ancient Rome--PhyT and SNT--maintaining that each is "particularly concerned with political corruption"; "the depravity of those who wield the state's power has quite undermined it." Hirsh notes a possible…

It is impossible to determine an exact modern value of the 100 francs in ShT, but internal, economic, and comparative literary evidence indicates that {dollar}5,000 is "a specific lower limit to the value of that amount in 1990's U.S. dollars." …

Argues that oral promises were binding in the largely oral, late-medieval culture and considers the contemporary "seriousness" of both Dorigen's marriage vow to Arveragus in FranT and her contradictory promise to Aurelius.

Chaucer is versed in medieval medical theories, which underlie the physical and emotional descriptions of the Reeve in both GP and RvP.

Chaucer intensifies the voluntarist diction found in sources of ClT, thus urging a reconsideration of the "Tale's" principal characters and of the will of God as it was understood in late-fourteenth-century England.

In WBP, the Wife delivers not a sermon but a mock legal case. Her reasoning is typical of courtroom reasoning, and (like lawyers) she buries her argument in rhetoric. Her unwritten law of marriage triumphs over the written laws of St. Paul, thus…

In determining Chaucer's plan for CT, too much attention has been placed on the Ellesmere and Hengwrt manuscripts at the expense of the other eighty-one manuscripts, where the order of the tales may differ. In Ad3 (British Library MS Additional…

The chaos in HF is partly the result of multiple interpretations of texts and massive disagreement among the characters. Geffrey may curse the individual who "misinterprets" his writing, but he is partly joking. Only those authors whose texts are…

Assembles references to Chaucer's character and literary reputation recorded in English books 1475-1640, the dates of the Short Title Catalog. Entries include author, title, publisher, and STC and University Microfilm (UMD) numbers and establish the…

Chaucer draws on a variety of sources--Boccaccio, Ovid, French dawn-songs, popular dawn-song traditions, courtly dawn-songs, and (perhaps) popular poetry--for the dawn-songs in RvT, MerT, Mars, and TC. He uses these sources in a variety of…

Both Criseyde's dream in Bk. 2 and Troilus's dream in Bk. 5 of TC are generally understood in terms that debase Criseyde. But Chaucer's intertextual construction of these dreams and his reconstruction of Cassandra and Criseyde from his sources…