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."
"Working within and yet exploding New Critical terminology," E. Talbot Donaldson's studies of Chaucer's irony--exemplified in his writing on Criseyde--are grounded in his deep understanding of rhetoric. They anticipate Linda Hutcheon's theory of…
In juxtaposition to D. W. Robertson's comprehensive historicist method, E. Talbot Donaldson's "fundamentally rhetorical mode of analysis" also constituted a historicist approach, but one that moved from philological detail "toward some larger whole,"…
Anderson, Judith H.
Chaucer Review 41 (2007): 271-78.
E. Talbot Donaldson's commentary on FranT in "Chaucer's Poetry" exemplifies his criticism "at its best": "[c]onstructive provocation, rather than dogmatic mastery."
In his analyses of the TC narrator as a character in his own right--most notably in "The Ending of Chaucer's Troilus" and "Criseide and Her Narrator"--E. Talbot Donaldson "created the most clear-cut paradigm shift in twentieth-century readings of the…
Gust, Geoffrey W.
Chaucer Review 41 (2007): 311-23.
Despite his tendency to view Chaucer's narrative persona in CT autobiographically, E. Talbot Donaldson's exploration of this persona paved the way "for the proliferation of studies that have taken account of Chaucer's narrators," studies in which…
The glosses to Mel and ParsT in Wynkyn de Worde's CT (1498, STC 5085) are closely related to those in Trinity College, Cambridge, MS R.3.15, suggesting that they shared a common exemplar, W. That hypothetical exemplar clarifies aspects of the history…
Mosser, Daniel W.
Chaucer Review 41 (2007): 360-92.
Scribal glosses in a copy of this third incunabular edition of CT (STC 5084) provide further evidence of manuscript W, a hypothesized manuscript affiliated with Trinity College, Cambridge, MS R.3.15, and Wynkyn de Worde's edition of CT. They also…
Da Rold, Orietta.
Chaucer Review 41 (2007): 393-438.
Systematic analysis of corrections disproves the notion that the Dd scribe was either careless or meddling, suggesting instead that his corrections were executed in the course of checking his copying against his exemplar. The remaining corrections…
Contrary to Stephen R. Reimer's crediting them to George Vertue (in Chaucer Review 41 [2006]), the drawings for the Urry portraits were executed by J. Chalmer and printed thereafter from engravings by Vertue.
In his initial governance of the carnivalesque "play" of tale-telling, Harry Bailly augments his masculinity by "queering" his fellow pilgrims; by the end of CT, his own masculinity is "undermined" by his inability to control the carnival he set in…
Besserman, Lawrence [L.]
Chaucer Review 41(2006): 99-104.
Given his interest in Chaucer and his ownership of a copy of TC, Dickens's "comic literary use of the motif of 'Christ-forgives-his-killers'" may be an echo of Chaucer's use of the motif, which is based on Luke 23.34, in TC 3.1577.
Building on medieval "gender comedies," including Chaucer's (especially WBP and the fabliaux), Lydgate anticipates the family-state analogy that pervades early modern political theory. By giving the complaints of abused husbands a court hearing, the…
Chaucer's depiction of the legendary battle of Actium likely reflects both his understanding of contemporary naval warfare technology and his awareness of military treatises by Vegetius and Giles of Rome.
Collette, Carolyn P.
Chaucer Review 42 (2008): 223- 43.
Considered in the light of key themes of Victorian medievalism and of her own early identification with Chaucer's Emily, Davison's actions--especially those leading to her untimely death--stand as expressions of her ethical commitment, rather than as…
Despite their empirical basis, the conclusions Linne R. Mooney draws regarding Adam Pinkhurst's relationship to Chaucer ultimately depend on literary evidence, which should remind scholars that while particular communities of readers make a work…
Reading Adam as a specimen of the genre of book curses reveals a tension in Adam between the incipient humanist idea of the author, "whose inventions transcend their scribal incarnations," and the reality in late medieval London of authors'…
Together, Chaucer's two references to the Alexandrian crusade in CT, along with his portrait of the Knight and depictions of Custance and the Sultaness in MLT, expose similarities between missionary work and crusading. The Knight's participation in…
Harry Bailly's remarks about his wife Goodelief constitute a community among the husbands along for the pilgrimage; they also call attention to various affiliations of wives in CT, e.g., the Clerk's "archewyves." As outlets for complaints about…
Through extensive use of "multiple dialogue introducers," Chaucer creates a "mimetic representation of speech" in Mel and thus invites a listening audience to be part of the fictional conversation and, beyond that, to emulate it by taking time to…
