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…
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…
