FranT and the "Tempest" share not only similarities in plot, character, and theme but also an engagement with the "status of poetry as allusion and conjuring act." The sense of "fiction dissolving into real life, and the voice of the narrator…
Chaucer's use of the Ovidian source of ManT, insisting on the tale of the crow--and not the connecting tale of the raven--allows him to argue for the "potentially treacherous nature of language" and to lead smoothly into Ret. The influence of Ovid is…
In the course of "Englishing" certain foreign texts, some early printers used Chaucerian "paratexts," evoking Chaucer's works, allusions, or style in efforts to bridge the gap between one literary period and the next and to express nostalgia for a…
Rosenblum, Joseph, with William K. Finley.
Chaucer Review 38: 140-57, 2003.
The artists of the Ellesmere manuscript carefully deviated from Chaucer's descriptions of the pilgrims to deflect the satire from the upper and upper-middle classes to the lower orders. When Chaucer's own descriptions were ambiguous, the artists…
TC exhibits a notable conflict between gift and not-gift economics--between ideal giving and practical commodity exchange. The rules of courtly love, ostensibly designed to ennoble the lover and enable "true" love, in practice disallow unconditional…
Allman, W. W., and D. Thomas Hanks, Jr.
Chaucer Review 38: 36-65. , 2003.
A "bodily economy of piercing men and pierced women" can be found throughout CT. Lovemaking is associated with cutting, stabbing, bleeding, and dying. The only accounts of lovemaking not connected to stabbing or bloodletting occur in the musical…
Pepys MS 2006 contains a unique grouping of Mel, ParsT, Truth, and Scog. Written by two scribes, it displays the names of John Kyriell (gentry) and William Fettyplace (London mercer). The two social classes of Kyriell and Fettyplace indicate either a…
Semenza, Gregory M. Colón.
Chaucer Review 38: 66-82, 2003.
Members of the aristocracy and the middle class engaged in wrestling. Thus, Chaucer's reference to the Miller as a wrestler cannot be dismissed as a reference to the lower class.
Depicting nature as an "active force," Chaucer encourages the reader to explore nature's "effects on social institutions and human drives." In so doing, he balances "a dis-enchanted skepticism about nature's benevolence" with "a canny understanding"…
Heffernan, Carol F.
Chaucer Review 39 (2004): 103-16.
Heffernan considers the clergeon's devotion to Mary's image in relation to historical medieval religious images and the "affective piety" they were produced to evoke among the unlearned.
An Anglo-Norman piece in BL MS Harley 2253 copied about 1340 is analogous to WBP in tone, wit, and "outrageousness." Chaucer might have known this story of two women discussing the virtues of chastity versus sexual license. Includes text and…
In MerT and two French fabliaux ("Les perdris" and "Le prestre qui abevete"), the "victims' justifiably skeptical search for visual proof" paradoxically results in deceptive "visual confirmation." Examining how this process takes place may elucidate…
Chaucer's changes to source material emphasize what shapes a person and how she comes to understand and experience the world. If Virginia had continued to refuse her father and Virginius had cut off his daughter's head despite her protests, the Tale…
Kennedy, Kathleen E.
Chaucer Review 39 (2004): 165-76.
Events depicted in Chaucer's French source "mirror a popular English legal remedy, the loveday or accord," and Chaucer uses the occasion to comment on the importance and role of "maintenance" (the "exchange of money and influence between a lord and…
Woods, William F.
Chaucer Review 39 (2004): 17-40.
RvT is "concerned with breaking the ranks of social hierarchy" and what causes individuals to desire such breaks. The clerks, the women, Bayard, and especially Symkyn all experience "frustrated desire," which leads Symkyn "to expand into outer or…
Although we know of no sustained aesthetic treatise dating from the Middle Ages, medieval people were lovers of beauty who conceived of worldly beauty as a reflection of divine perfection. Ginsberg comments on Chaucer's leave-taking of his poem in…
Knapp argues that a historicized, aesthetic appreciation of Chaucer is possible, despite recent tendencies to focus on ideological issues only. The aesthetic theories of Kant and Gadamer help to explain the roles of subjectivity, universality, and…
Horowitz assesses the aesthetic value of BD by focusing on three "transcapes" (through visions): that of the narrator as a literary medium; that of the work's interwoven sources and time spans; and that of the gendered landscape, which is both…
Hill argues that Troilus's pagan, earthly joy in the second half of Book 3 of TC is Chaucer's representation of "the maximum of good and beauty to be found outside of Christian belief and the dispensations of faith." The intense joy experienced by…
Taylor reads ShT and Mel as an opposed pair. In ShT, puns indicate the failure of human attempts at community; in Mel, doublets encourage and iterate a linguistic and aesthetic community. Civil society comes into order in and through Mel, which…
Reads ManPT, ParsPT, and Ret in light of the Dionysian/Apollonian opposition posed by Nietzsche in "The Birth of Tragedy Out of Music." Whereas Nietzsche treated the two as irreconcilable, Chaucer combines them in "an ethical aesthetics and an…
Twu, Krista Sue-Lo.
Chaucer Review 39 (2005): 341-78.
Although ParsT relies heavily on Raymond de Penaforte's "Summa de poenitentia et matrimonio," Chaucer extracts one chapter from the treatise and substitutes a "tree of life" for Raymond's pilgrimage metaphor. By indicating that one can live a life of…
