Browse Items (16370 total)

In her introduction, Chance treats the life and works of Christine de Pizan, the origins of Pizan's "gynocentric mythography" and the debate over the "Rose," medieval genealogy of the gods, and the "Letter of Othea" as a mythographic text, with…

Examines several mythological winds and traces the use of Zephirus as a "revivifying wind" in Isidore, Bersuire, and Boethius. Chaucer uses the myth of Zephirus and Flora in BD to suggest psychological healing; in TC 5.10, for ironic effect; in…

In ParsP, the Parson vehemently rejects the "lies" of pagan fables, as in the scandalous ManT. Yet, medieval poets often used "unseemly stories of the gods"--especially stories dealing with love, sex, and immorality--for their own political or moral…

Chaucer's Pardoner owes a debt to Jean de Meun's Fals-Semblant ("Roman de la Rose"), whose false-seeming depends on clothing. In PardT, clothing metaphors become symbols for the relationship between body and soul. The Pardoner's reliance on the…

Satire and eroticism underlie exaggerated images of the lady and the lover in Ros and Mars; Chaucer repeats these anticourtly attitudes in Purse.

Describes pedagogical projects for courses in Chaucer and Middle English literature.

Form Age, For, Sted, Gent, and Truth show a progression from a strict Boethian adaptation to a more Christian or specifically Augustinian view. The tension appears in the pervasive irony.

An overview of research in progress on the mythographic tradition in the Middle Ages (primarily commentary on the works of Virgil, Lucan, Statius, Martianus Capella, Boethius, and Ovid) and examples of its applicability to Chaucer.

These highly unconventional epistolary poems lack well-defined literary antecedents and clearcut sources, instead reflecting the poet's own experiences and opinions on his craft and love and marriage. As universal ironic statements by a naive…

Examines Chaucer's astrological and mythological allusions in light of medieval mythographic commentaries, arguing that such analysis discloses "embarrassing secrets."

The Knight, in representing the gods, omits any reference to the castration of Saturn in order to justify the ascendancy of Jupiter, the authority of Theseus, and the political situation of the later fourteenth century, "a dark time in which…

In his fiction, Chance contends, Tolkien subverts traditional class distinctions, and his studies of Chaucer reflect a similar sensibility.

Considers the roles of apartheid and linguistic queerness in the class-based characterizations of various hobbits in Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings," suggesting that Tolkien's scholarly study of Chaucer's literary dialects and his glossary for the…

Treats Boccaccio's "Famous Women," LGW, and Christine de Pizan's "The Book of the City of Ladies," reading Chaucer's "faithful women" in LGW "as metaphors [of] the relationship between authorship and readership, trying to define his own position [as]…

Compares the comic treatment of sententiousness in NPT with modern philosophical uses of aphorism. Both are "Menippean" in their contrasts of high and low discourse, and both ask us to perceive their points rather than to understand conceptually.

Explores problems in "Troilus and Cressida" in light of Shakespeare's uses of his sources, including TC.

Computer-assisted analysis of the 276 neologisms in Bo produces statistical descriptions of their source languages,their distribution in Bo, and their occurrences in other works by Chaucer. The analysis underpins surmises about the range and nature…

Describes the variety of ways Chaucer uses noun-adjective compounds to produce "strong connotations or heightened effects."

Includes discussion of "a shared six-part musical structure, hitherto unnoticed" in the pairing of KnT and MilT.

Contends that Chaucer employs music as a literary aesthetic, which creates a "structure of narrative mirroring" in KnT and MilT.

Examines music as a coequal to rhetoric and a branch of medieval philosophy to argue that Chaucer's beast fable traces and complicates three major tenets of Boethian and medieval music theory.

Challenges claims that the first-person feminine pronouns of ShT 7.11-19 indicate that the tale was originally intended to be told by the Wife of Bath, reading the lines as if they were presented in a "miming male" voice, and suggesting that the tale…

Fictional adaptation of WBP set in the frame of the CT.

WBP, belonging to the genre of the French sermon joyeux, "a parodic homily by a woman that uses biblical exegesis to endorse worldly pleasure," had a "topical resonance" for Lollards, who, "championing female literacy and lay biblical exegesis,…

Studies the ways "expressions of romantic fulfillment are disrupted by the excesses and inconsistencies that desire produces in the narrative developments and rhetorical gestures" of works about love by Chaucer, Montemayor, Sidney, and Shakespeare.