Browse Items (16346 total)

The vivid association of the dramatic action of TC with its physical settings reflects a medieval rhetorical technique whereby architectural images ("loci") were employed as aids to organization and memory. The perception of the significance of…

Foreshadowing submission to Troilus and Diomede, Criseyde's erotic dream of the eagle symbolizes her fear of man's aggressive nature and her belief in love's ennobling influence. Throughout the poem love modifies the worst in Troilus, the warrior,…

Chaucer has greatly expanded the role of Hector from his comparatively minor status in Boccaccio. As an honorable man of action and reason, Hector is a thematic contrast to Troilus, who is often prostrated by egocentric passions and loses Criseyde…

Although only minor characters, Calkas, Helen, and Cassandra contribute significantly both to the double sorrow of Troilus and to the reader's knowledge of the origin, progress, and inevitable outcome of the conflict between the Greeks and the…

The alternation of "thou" and "ye" forms in TC may be seen as indicating characters psychological development.

Through his poetic wit Chaucer makes Criseyde resemble a religious, even Christ. These suggestions add to the irony of the love.

Negative elimination, sources, and proleptic passages isolate the moon, both symbol for inconstancy and threshold to immutability, as Troilus's port of death, logically compatible with the variants. Venus, traditionally combining the poem's themes…

Criseyde's allusion to Prudence with "eyen thre" is derived from Dante's "Purgatorio," 29.132; but since the Italian reference is cryptic in style and symbology, Chaucer was probably also influenced by glosses and illuminations for the passage,…

The stellar phenomenon of TC 3.624-25 certainly occurred in 1385, more likely May 12 (though Saturn was not quite in Cancer, something which Chaucer's Tables may have erred about) than June 9, when a crescent moon may not have been visible in London.

According to Virgil (Aeneid, VI) Deiphobus became the husband of Helen after Paris' death. Perhaps Pandarus reveals a covert knowledge of this burgeoning romance when, in TC II, he confidently sends Helen and Deiphobus into the garden for an hour,…

The 1368 date for the death of Blanche of Lancaster in J. J. N. Palmer's article ChauR 8 (1974) is probably correct, but this does not vitiate the 1377 date proposed by Condren ChauR 5 (1971) for the composition of BD.

BD displays the process of consolation as emotional change effected through the medium of epideictic discourse. In the act of speaking, the grieved knight apprehends the cause of his grief in a new way, and is consoled.

The dreamer discovers the inner urgency of a love that sought to transcend death; the knight, the external actuality of death. Chaucer's consolation lies in the recognition of the emotional (and not doctrinal) ineffability that art is. Grief is not…

The variations in narrative structure from BD to PF reveal a shift in Chaucer's belief from faith in the capacity of experience, book, and dream as sources of absolute truth to skepticism about these same medieval traditions.

"Guy of Warwick" served as an object of serious imitation as well as parody. The scene in BD engaging the dreamer with the man in black as traceable to this source, as are the deliberately naive questioner and other such devices for achieving…

The systematized tradition of the "Chasse Royal," as described in contemporary handbooks of venery, establishes a pattern for the action of BD and explains many of the images and allusions.

Chaucer emphasizes the phallic deity Priapus as a figure of frustration in PF. He does not try to abolish or deify the sexual passion Priapus represents. Priapus and the noble suitors may represent unproductive extremes of a more balanced position…

Chaucer's unifying theme in PF is political rather than otherworldly. It involves the contrast between an orderly world governed by natural law (the gate's first inscription and Scipio's "commune profit") and a chaotic world controlled by selfish…

The poet juxtaposes the narrator's dream to a summary of the "Somnium Scipionis," reconciling Venus and Nature, and resolving the strain of living in a world of abstract thought and human experience.

The 'certyn thyng' the narrator deludedly pursues through scholarly exploration is the necessity of undergoing experience (i.e., entering the gates "for better of for worse") to discover the meaning of love. Nature's concern for the "commune profyt"…

HF demonstrates metaphorically the unreliability of the transmission of knowledge. Chaucer makes the point by abruptly cutting off the authority figure at the end.

Many sources and analogues for Chaucer's poem, including the "Roman de la Rose," "Panthere d'amours," "La dance aux aveugles," and "Trionfo d'amore," as well as a reference in his own LGW (G, 403-05), suggest that the "man of great authority" is the…

HF externalizes an artificial memory process that Chaucer learned from "Ad Herennium" and Bradwardine.

LGW demonstrates the fundamental importance of the tale or story at the end of the Middle Ages.

The "G" Prologue to LGW is central to Chaucer's poetic career both chronologically and artistically. The Prologue and its narrator are a "mythic distillation" of Chaucer's earlier works and show the love poet's mature awareness of his position in…