Browse Items (16472 total)

Focuses on how Troilus's "disciplined imagination" can be viewed through an understanding of "rhetoric's ancient connection with moral philosophy."

Explores the roles of distress, dislocation, and thoughtfulness in medieval academic discourse, theology, and literary invention. Includes comments on the scene of encountering marvels in SqT (81ff., esp. 189–95)--among the "many [examples] to…

Contrasts the "tone, circumstance and result" of the Ceyx and Alcyone story and the grief of the Black Knight in BD, suggesting that the contrasts in the heart/herte hunt emphasize the consolation of Chaucer's poem.

Argues that BD draws on Welsh mythology for a number of its details including the king named Octavian, the hunt motif, and the "white castle on a rich hill." King Octavian is a "composite figure" with several onomastic resonances.

Explains Criseyde's comment about Troilus in TC 3.88 in light of the Feast of Fools, suggesting that it means she considers him neither a fool nor "too bold or irreverent."

The use of "gnof" to describe John the carpenter is appropriate because it suggests "churl" and "numbskull" and further emphasizes the "ease with which John is hoodwinked."

Polish academic writing on Chaucer follows a political pattern. Retreating from politically charged topics, students and professors have concentrated on linguistics topics, such as morphology, syntax, semantics, and loanwords. Most "literary"…

Examines loathly ladies in Irish myth, Chaucer (WBT), Gower ("Florent"), Dame Ragnell, Thomas of Erceldoune, and ballads, focusing on two loci--court and forest--and kinds of power. Also examines the political significance of the refiguration of…

Chaucer's WBT destabilizes gender roles rather than focusing on the issues of kingship at the core of most of the loathly-lady tales. WBT engages issues of personal power politics as it creates a lively, garrulous character, but the moral lies in the…

Assesses Spenser's Duessa in light of WBT and its Middle English analogues, exploring how Spenser turned the Irish sovereignty motif against the Irish.

Because the loathly lady in WBT is not enchanted but is a shape-shifter under her own power, she likely is not virginal. Carter explores the implications of this likelihood, as well as parallel concerns in WBT and several analogues.

Offers impressionistic appreciation of ways that Chaucer "naturalized and made his own the continental traditions," with particular attention to the conventions of courtly love. Comments on a range of short poems: ABC, Mars, Ros, FormAge, Scog, Buk,…

Astr (and probably Equat) may serve to show that Chaucer was not merely curious about astronomy but was, in the modern sense, an active amateur who made astronomical observations.

Considers the dates of BD and Jean Froissart's "Dit dou Bleu Chevalier" and explores their similarities, arguing that Froissart's poem inspired the central idea ("l'idée centrale") and many other features of Chaucer's poem--aspects of…

Reviews attempts to clarify Chaucer's reference to Morpheus's companion "Eclympasteyr," found in BD line 167 and also found in Froissart's "Paradys d'Amour" as "Enclimpostair." Argues on linguistic and literary grounds that the name in "plain…

Cladistics-the use of large-scale computer analysis of data, including variant readings-promises the possibility of identifying patterns of textual transmission. However, the inevitability of interpretive disagreement in selecting evidence or in…

Cartlidge examines the range of attitudes toward marriage, sexuality, and the family in CT - including questions of marriage as an ordering principle, sexuality as a threat to marriage, and sexuality as a form of aggression outside of marriage. Also…

In FranT, Chaucer presents a "moral dilemma that might be described as scholastic in its contrived intractability." The "quaestio disputanda" posed at the end of FranT compels readers to confront the Tale's irresolvable legal complexities of…

Cartlidge investigates gossip as mundane, trivial speech in TC, in contrast to the more dangerous tradition of damaging speech invoked by Pandarus.

Chaucer's evocation of contrasting senses of "frend" sharpens his depiction of Criseyde's precarious state in Troy. Lacking advisors, and thus dangerously dependent on Pandarus and Troilus, she also belongs to a network of relationships devoted…

Suggests possible sources for Chaucer's ideas on parenthood that influenced CkT, including the "Wisdom commentary of Dominican friar, Robert Holcot." Also compares Holcot's views on parental responsibility with those in PhyT.

Discredits the idea that the Eagle's disquisition on sound in HF is conventional Aristotelianism, mediated by Robert Grosseteste or Walter Burley, arguing that the details of the multiplying ripples and the combination of science and myth were…

Suggests that Robert Holcot's commentary on the Book of Wisdom is the immediate source of HF, 991–1017 and 1259–70, and ParsT, 603–7, describing the authors' shared skepticism about the "limits of human knowledge" and discussing specific echoes…

Chaucer's illustrates the reciprocity of hearing and speaking by demonstrating how perfectly the characters of TC understand each other's indirectly spoken meanings. The reader's complicity in this implit communication is stressed particularly in…

Summarizes "Aristotelian cosmology" and describes its role as a structural and thematic device in Dante's "Paradiso." Describes the roles of astrology, the humours, and alchemy in Chaucer's CT, especially in the description of the Physician and in…