Pugh explores the "performative cruelties" of TC--the ways the three major characters are willing to "resort to tactics of cruelty to advance their individual agendas" and the way the narrative itself displays the "pleasures of salvation" that are…
Braswell, Mary Flowers.
Chaucer Review 39 (2005): 402-19
Haweis's two books--Chaucer for Children (1877) and Chaucer for Schools (1881)--reveal much about Victorian Chaucerians, their conversations, and their research. A scholarly popularizer, Haweis supported Chaucer's reputation during the formative…
Johnson, James [D.]
Chaucer Review 39 (2005): 436-55
Tabulates and annotates fifty-seven studies that identify or discuss allusions to Chaucer, presented as a continuation of Caroline Spurgeon's Five Hundred Years of Chaucer Criticism and Allusion (1925). Includes a name and title index for the…
Treats the Host of CT as a psychological character whose recurrent levity disguises neither his pride nor the fact that he is "hen-pecked" by his wife, Goodelief. Essentially comic and naturalistic, Harry participates significantly in the marriage…
Assesses the styles and rhetorical devices of FranT. Matching rhetoric to meaning, Chaucer's "modulation of style" in FranT helps to characterize the narrator and the major characters of the Tale and to guide readers' understanding of the variable…
Brown, Emerson Jr.
Chaucer Review 4.1 (1969): 31-40.
Explores the sources of Chaucer's allusions to Priapus and to Pyramus and Thisbe in MerT (4.2034-37 and 4.2125-31) and argues that the allusions deepen the bitter cynicism of the Tale by suggesting sexual fruitlessness and frustration in the pear…
Kauffman, Corrine E.
Chaucer Review 4.1 (1969): 41-48.
Uses late-medieval and Renaissance herbals to show that the ingredients for a remedy that Pertelote recommends to Chanticleer in NPT are all "quite wrong for her patient" and his condition: some unavailable, some inappropriate, and some deadly. The…
Golden, Samuel L.
Chaucer Review 4.1 (1969): 49-54.
Demonstrates that Chaucer's works are a significant source of John Minsheu's multilingual dictionary, "Guide into the Tongues" ["Ductor in Linquas"] (1617).
Levy, Bernard S.
Chaucer Review 4.2 (1969): 106-22.
Argues that the discussion of gentility by the Loathly Lady in WBP effects a change in the knight's moral vision, with no physical change in the Lady. Imagery and allusions to Baptism reinforce the point and run parallel to similar concerns in WBP,…
Mogan, Joseph J., Jr.
Chaucer Review 4.2 (1969): 123-41.
Studies the "theology of marital relations" in MilT, WBP, and MerT, using ParsT as a partial statement of orthodoxy, surveying views from Augustine to Wyclif of the roles of procreation and pleasure in sexual relations between married partners, and…
Associates the Wife of Bath with the antic "rogue figure of wife" from conventional "low comedy" or "pantomime," more lively and vivid than realistic. Derived from the "topsy-turvy" world of conventional comedy, the Wife gains readers' sympathy…
Describes similarities and differences "between fourteenth-century and modern biography" and argues that medieval writers of verse fiction were interested in characters "as individuals." A "sense of abundant life" is generated by the ironies and…
Allen, Judson Boyce, and Patrick Gallacher.
Chaucer Review 4.2 (1969): 99-105.
Excavates the multi-layered ironies of WBT, focusing on the motifs of transformation and bad judgment and on the Wife of Bath's manipulations of her narrative materials, particularly the Ovidian Midas exemplum.
Spencer, William
Chaucer Review 4.3 (1970): 147-70.
Tallies evidence that the "twelvefold pattern of [zodiacal] signs and planets" of medieval astrology is the "hidden ground plan" of GP, underlying its sequence of characters and some details of their descriptions.
Knoepflmacher, U. C.
Chaucer Review 4.3 (1970): 180-83.
Suggests that two allusions to Matthew's gospel in the GP description of the Prioress contribute to the "ironic stance" of the description, despite the narrator's "calculated evasiveness."
Surveys and summarizes critical assessments of Chaucer's Pardoner and PardPT from ca. 1940-1970, observing trends and emphases. Then offers a reading of the Pardoner as an extravagant "put-on" who deliberately creates an outrageous personality for…
Watts, Ann Chalmers.
Chaucer Review 4.4 (1970): 229-41.
Posits that the "distance" between Chaucer and his various speaking personae is difficult to define because it "fluctuates" within individual poems and because a reader's sense of a given narrator is modified by the "fantastic" setting of the poem…
Koretsky, Allen C.
Chaucer Review 4.4 (1970): 242-66.
Describes the presence of apostrophe ("exclamatio") in TC and assesses its various effects: amplification, heightening of style, advancement of plot, and characterization--especially of Troilus, Criseyde, and the narrator, but also of Pandarus,…
Covella, Sister Francis Dolores.
Chaucer Review 4.4 (1970): 267-83.
Gauges the "literary probability" that the Envoy to ClT (and the preceding stanza), 4.1170-1212, was intended by Chaucer to be voiced by the Clerk, suggesting that either the Host or the Wife of Bath may be considered the speaker, adducing manuscript…
Schrader, Richard J.
Chaucer Review 4.4 (1970): 284-90.
Argues that the allusions in NPT to mermaids as sirens and to Burnel the ass help to indicate Chauntecleer's own culpability in his temporary downfall as well as contributing comedy to the Tale.
The thirty-one portraits in the Kelmscott Chaucer show Burne-Jones's development as a painter and his identification with Chaucer as an artist. Burne-Jones represents Chaucer as a tall and slender man, similar to his own self-portraits. The emotions…
