Browse Items (16371 total)

Argues that the Clerk's Envoy "generates a unifying theme which runs through" MerT--the possibilities of "perfection and imperfection in marriage, expressed as paradise and purgatory"--an echo of the concern with "purgatory" in WBPT. Explores the…

Argues that the obtuse narrator's misreading of the Ovidian story of Ceyx and Alcyone in BD misleads him and underlies the poem's general encouragement that people must accept misfortune. The narrator within the dream is not obtuse, but he does not…

Contrasts the form of Anel with that of Mars and compares its form and themes with those of Chaucer's dream visions and its characterizations with those in KnT. Also hypothesizes what Chaucer may have intended to do further in Anel with the source…

Details way in which the dialogue between the Dreamer and Black Knight in BD "closely follows the pattern of the first two books" of Boethius's "Consolation of Philosophy," with the Dreamer paralleling Philosophy and the Knight the character…

Outrage at Walter's treatment of Griselda, seeing Griselda's story as a religious allegory of patience, even seeing it as a folk tale rewritten--such responses indicate that ClT is a poem "divided against itself." One way to resolve these conflicts…

Art edition of selections from CT: GP, MilT, RvT, FrT, MerT, WBT, SumT, and PardT, with collage-like illustrations that combine imagery from medieval and modern sources,

Addresses issues of teaching Gower and Chaucer in college survey classes.

Fourteen essays by various authors, with an introduction and a "Personal Tribute" by the editor, offering accounts and analyses of Gower's works, influence, and reception. For three essays pertaining to Chaucer, search for Studies in the Age of Gower…

A discursive bibliography of Chaucer studies for 2008, divided into four subcategories: general, CT, TC, and other works.

Explores Emily's moments of speech and silence in KnT to argue that, at the end of the narrative, she is "the perfect example of the silent signifier," lacking any personal meaning beyond what is inscribed by the prevailing courtly attitudes.

To alleviate disappointment at Criseyde's lack of agency, readers should appreciate her not as a "real" woman but as an embodiment of the medieval masculine imagination. Criseyde follows the pattern of many of Chaucer's female characters: caught in a…

The opposition of knowledge in HF suggests the fourteenth-century reaction to the scholastic efforts of the thirteenth century to forge a synthesis between reason and faith. However, this dissertation does not argue that Chaucer was a reformer. The…

The motif of "fals apparences" is a unifying factor of HF. The eagle as sophist or false philosopher, in seizing the narrator as prey, is reminiscent of Satan as fowler, or Dante's Gerione, emblem of fraud.

Comments on how uses of the term "solas" help to establish character in TC and Tho.

Close reading of several GP descriptions (including the Knight, Monk, Clerk, Sergeant at Law, and Summoner) shows how Chaucer's shifting tones produce ironic implications.

Since Chaucer did not indicate any punctuation, unpuctuating Chaucer can help us read Chaucer's poetry more flexibly and vivaciously.

Surveys critical commentary on Chaucer's prosody, noting its subordination to commentary on his narrative art.

A close reading of the Envoy to ClT underscores Chaucer's brilliant ambiguity and makes the assigning of it to a single speaker impossible.

Considers the pedagogical value of memorizing verse and comments on exercises in retention for students of Chaucer's poetry. Includes close reading of several stanzas of PF.

Close reading of three passages on Troilus's suffering (5.218-38, 540-53, 1674-1722) reveals an intensification of emotion through "rhetorical figures of compression and repetition and by cascades of rhyme sounds within the rhyme royal forms." The…

Close reading of the GP description of the Monk shows how a "complex interaction of the reader with Chaucer's text" produces a more satisfactory reading than does the positing of a naive narrator.

Chaucer's poetry should be declaimed or at least heard with the "mind's ear." His decasyllabic couplets, once dismissed by critics as "riding rhyme" and even confused with the doggerel of Th, are "eminently playable," offering a variety of…

Focuses on materiality and objects in PrT, specifically the corpse, the antiphon, and the "greyn," and their "transcendence of the miraculous object." Claims that these objects illustrate Carolyn Bynum's notion of material objects involved in…

Three features characterize the collections of tales of Don Juan Manuel, Boccaccio, and Chaucer, especially as they relate to cultural context: marks of realism or authentication, thematic concern with unity and diversity, and the presence of the…

Twenty-seven-line poem in which the appearance of Chaucer in a classroom triggers an epiphany.