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…
In view of Chaucer's resistance to the "finality of closure," allusions to CkT in Fragment 9 suggest that CkT "may be complete for Chaucer, although not completed by the Cook." Perhaps the Tale's "unfinished business" is an interruption by one of the…
Palmer, James M.
Chaucer Review 41 (2006): 197-205.
Considered in the light of writings by thirteenth-century ophthalmologist Benvenutus Grassus, January's blindness in MerT is no sudden infirmity. With his admitted habit of "overindulgence" in women, food, and drink, January has been working on…
Ransom, Daniel J.
Chaucer Review 41 (2006): 206-12.
Troilus's reference to Apollo speaking "out of a tree" (TC 3.543) is likely not a reflection of Chaucer's misunderstanding Ovid. Numerous authors Chaucer may have read, including Bartholomaeus Anglicus, provide grounds for the conclusion that the…
Studying SumT with John Gay's 1717 poem "An Answer to the Sompner's Prologue of Chaucer" reveals a continuum of greed in SumT, moving from goods of use value, to coins of exchange value, to excrement and insubstantial air, even as Chaucer satirizes…
While the knight of WBT returns from his quest with the word that saves his life - "sovereynetee" - he never understands its meaning: "independence and self-government." The wedding-night conversation between the knight and the "wyf" demonstrates her…
Revisiting E. Talbot Donaldson's scholarship provokes nostalgia as well as the recognition that, for Donaldson, "poems of the order of Chaucer's arouse feelings as well as thoughts, feelings based on the critic's own experience."
