Carruthers, Leo.
Jacqueline Hamesse et al., eds. Medieval Sermons and Society: Cloister, City, University: Proceedings of International Symposia at Kalamazoo and New York. Textes et etudes du Moyen Age, no. 9 (Louvain-la-Neuve: Fłdłration Internationale des Instituts d'₁tudes Młdiłvales, 1998), pp. 219-40.
Shows how the Middle English sermon series :Jacob's Well" reflects many aspects of contemporary society. Carruthers likens its audience to that of CT.
Comments on literary framing structures in manuals of religious instruction and confession, from the "Somme le Roi" to ParsT. Briefly compares ParsT to "Jacob's Well."
Examines the English educational system in Chaucer's time, tracing the paths from parish schools to the universities indicated in the GP portraits of the Clerk and the Parson.
Carruthers, Leo.
Wendy Harding, ed. Drama, Narrative and Poetry in The Canterbury Tales (Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Mirail, 2003), pp. 51-67.
Carruthers examines the framing structure and links of CT, with particular attention to the Host's role. Harry Bailey is both a unifying instrument in the poet's hands and an extension of Chaucer's identity, an alter ego who will ultimately be…
Discusses the genre of "lay" as a subset of romance, and places individual lays in their historical and literary contexts, reexamining the meaning of "Breton" in relation to medieval Celtic literature more generally. Compares Chaucer's lays to…
Carruthers, Leo.
Claire Vial, ed. 'Gode is the lay, swete is the note': Résonances dans les lais bretons moyen-anglais / Echoes in the Middle English Breton Lays (2014): n.p. (web publication).
Explores the semantic and cultural fields underlying the terms 'Breton' and 'Celtic'. Posits that Chaucer willingly betrays his knowledge of the traditional geography and culture connected with Breton lays in FranT.
Carruthers, Mary (J.)
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
In an interdisciplinary study drawing upon "modern hermeneutical theory; art history and codicology; psychology and anthropology; the histories of medicine, education, and of meditation and spirituality," Carruthers posits that "medieval culture was…
Carruthers, Mary (J.)
English Language Notes 23 (1985): 11-20
"At hom" referred to "one's native dwelling," while "bord" signified "meals." "Gossib" referred to the baptismal sponsor and suggests that the Wife may well have had children. Jankyn's being "At hom to bord / With my gossib" implies that he lived…
Carruthers, Mary (J.)
Ruth Evans and Lesley Johnson, eds. Feminist Readings in Middle English Literature: The Wife of Bath and All Her Sect (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 39-44.
Comments on the rhetorical ontology of the Wife of Bath. The character is a figure of power who "continues to bother" because she is not silenced in the text, compelling readers to wish to respond.
Carruthers, Mary (J.)
New Literary History 24 (1993): 881-904
Dante and Chaucer use "buildings of the imagination" to organize lists of names, lists less informational than "inventional"--sets of associated plots or ideas that may reverberate in the work in which they appear. Examples from HF and BD as well as…
Carruthers, Mary (J.)
Representations 93 (2006): 1-21.
Carruthers reevaluates Troilus's weeping and lamentation in Book 4 of TC in the context of monastic tradition, including the works of Peter of Celle and Galen, that sees links "among perception, sensation, and rational process."
Carruthers, Mary (J.)
Journal of Narrative Technique 2 (1972): 208-14.
Argues that FrT and SumT "explore the question of true meaning in far-reaching ways." Concerned with "externals" only, the Friar's summoner ignores intention, while the Friar himself (a "false glossator" though described as worthy) "cannot properly…
Carruthers, Mary [J.]
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 21: 3-26, 1999.
Confronts questions of canonicity, the "value" of literature, and the relations between language and literature, encouraging members of the New Chaucer Society to help revitalize the role of language study. Equipped with a historical sense of how no…
Carruthers, Mary [J.]
John M. Hill and Deborah M. Sinnreich-Levi, eds. The Rhetorical Poetics of the Middle Ages: Reconstructive Polyphony. Essays in Honor of Robert O. Payne (Madison, N.J., and London: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press and Associated University Presses, 2000), pp. 67-87.
Medieval memory is inherently social and constructive, playing a central role in the process of composition and thus BD is best understood in the context not of psychology but of rhetoric, as an "act of public mourning, of public remembering."
Carruthers, Mary [J.]
Chris Humphrey and W. M. Ormrod, eds. Time in the Medieval World (Suffolk: York Medieval Press, 2001), pp. 137-55.
Like tense-switching and first-person point of view, the use of the "historical present" by Chaucer and the Gawain poet illustrates how medieval authors could convincingly remember and authenticate the stories they told. The past is the time of…
Carruthers, Mary J.
John V. Fleming and Thomas J. Heffernan, eds. Studies in the Age of Chaucer, Proceedings, No. 2, 1986 (Knoxville, Tenn.: New Chaucer Society, 1987), pp. 179-88.
Concerns the influence upon Chaucer exerted by the "rhetorica ad herennium," specifically in the art of memory training, which was largely ignored in medieval commentary until it was revived in Italy. Both Dante and Chaucer make use of the…
Carruthers, Mary J.
Chaucer Review 17 (1983): 221-34.
Some medieval readers or hearers would have considered ClT incredible or cruel. The Clerk agrees with the Wife that gentilesse means "trouthe," fidelity and integrity.
The Franklin is a gentleman with old-fashioned but praise-worthy standards. FranT treats the fourteenth-century interdependent virtues of "trouthe and honour, fredom and curteisie" (A46)--moral values in ambiguous wrappings.
Alisoun has learned through experience that her marital happiness depends upon practical economic control rather than on surrender to the ideals of feminine subservience espoused by authorities. Her tale parodies these authorities in its…
Carruthers, Mary J.
Robert R. Edwards, ed. Art and Context in Late Medieval English Narrative: Essays in Honor of Robert Worth Frank, Jr (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1994), pp. 93-106.
Carruthers explores the role of memory, one of the five divisions of classical rhetoric, in composing and understanding medieval poetry. Works such as "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" and Chaucer's KnT are "memory-friendly" because images…
Argues that the Frontispiece of the 1420 manuscript of TC (Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 61) demonstrates a medieval tradition of textuality that is not only oral and aural but social, and an example of group textuality in which words and…
