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…
Unlike the character in the sources and analogues, Custance in MLT forcefully confronts her father's authority at times. This confrontation and her willingness to disclose her past inscribe a "lesser version of the incest motif that has supposedly…
Mel is "very much about what happens when texts are taken out of one context and put to work in another." Prudence invokes gender in shaping her arguments, and her presentation of her authorities reminds us that the "processes of textual engendering…
MkP reflects the Monk's anxiety about cross-dressers such as Zenobia, whom he orientalizes in MLT as a monstrous threat to traditional authority. Eventually humiliated and punished, Zenobia trades her helmet for a woman's headdress.
Surveys Chaucer's reception in Danish scholarship, curricula, and translations, emphasizing the need for a Danish translation of CT that does not lose Chaucer's "subtlety and poetic forcefulness."
Differences in prose style, in syntactic and conceptual organization, and in levels of technical expertise between Astr and Equat indicate that Chaucer did not write the latter. Equat shows more skill in calculation, but Astr demonstrates more…
Two documents in the National Archives (London) show that Alice Perrers was married to Janyn Perers, possibly an Italian, before becoming Edward III's mistress. These records hint that she was "a person of lower birth who made her fortune essentially…
Excerpted from Chaucer's LGW and thus lacking a narrative frame, the Legend of Thisbe in the Findern manuscript leaves room for the assumption that the manuscript's female readers saw Thisbe "as simply a victim." The excerpt's codicological context,…
Allusions in SumT to the "silent canon" - the clerical practice of offering the Eucharistic consecration prayers silently - open a window on "lay-clerical relations," exposing the politics governing access to the secrets of the Eucharist. Through its…
Dobbs, Elizabeth A.
Chaucer Review 40 (2006): 289-310.
Aurelius's comparison of himself to the nymph Echo early in FranT enables glimpses of Narcissus in Dorigen and emphasizes the importance of speech and interpretation in the Tale: in particular, Aurelius's Echo-like interpretations of Dorigen's…
Gaylord, Alan T.
Chaucer Review 40 (2006): 311-33.
A search of contemporary Chaucerian criticism for signs of whether D. W. Robertson's "exegetical criticism" continues to generate important work yields the conclusion "no, yes, and perhaps": "no," in the wake of the ascendance of historicist…
A study of five Middle English lists of romances, including the list in Chaucer's Th (7.897-902). Liu uses the "prototype theory of categorization" from cognitive linguistics to provide the rationale for a flexible yet rigorous definition of the…
Thompson, Kenneth J.
Chaucer Review 40 (2006): 386-415.
Although the Knight's Yeoman may be a "forster" (1.117) before all else, the skills he would possess in that role "would find ready application on military campaign," which helps to explain the Knight's choice of his Yeoman, rather than another…
Rock, Catherine A.
Chaucer Review 40 (2006): 416-32.
Arcite breaks his oath of brotherhood with Palamon, the promise he made to Theseus never to return to Athens, and the code of knighthood by doing menial labor disguised as a "povre laborer." The "ignoble, freakish manner of [his] death" thus suits…
Eyler, Joshua R., and John P. Sexton.
Chaucer Review 40 (2006): 433-39.
Following Arcite's death in KnT, Theseus designates for his funeral "that selve grove" (1. 2860) where Arcite and Palamon first fought privately, which technically would have been "destroyed" to erect the lists for the public tournament in which…
New facets of Chaucer's writing on love, consolation, and repentance are illuminated when we assume that Chaucer did translate Pseudo-Origen's "De Maria Magdalena," as he claims to have done in LGWP G418 ("Orygenes upon the Maudeleyne").
Reimer, Stephen R.
Chaucer Review 41 (2006): 105-09.
Proofs of George Vertue's prints held in the University of Southern California's Doheny Memorial Library provide firm evidence that Vertue executed all but one of the engravings in the 1721 edition of John Urry's The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer and…
Read in the light of late medieval letter collections and conduct manuals for women, the comedy of ShT springs from a recognition of the merchant's wife's "clever manipulation of her roles: as hostess, social networker, housekeeper, business…
The relation between public and private in MilT may be understood as the condition of "extimacy": "the presence of the Other at the place thought to be most intimate." The "structure of extimacy" frustrates masculine attempts to control or acquire…
