Browse Items (16371 total)

Rubrics in "Filostrato" manuscripts label Calkas's bid to trade a prisoner for his daughter as an "oratory." Chaucer's version of the speech fulfills the formal requirements of a speech arguing "for a particular course of action" and in so doing…

When used in direct discourse, "as" often functions as a "discourse particle" in a manner similar to "the multivalent 'like' that seasons the more youthful dialects of Modern English." Such words allow interlocutors to convey meanings while not…

The editorial break between MerE and SqH cannot be defended on the basis of manuscript evidence. The break has obscured an element of the "artistic design" of CT: a sequence of four tales whose tellers represent occupations held either by Chaucer or…

Comments on the concern with propagating robust and pure lineages in numerous areas of medieval culture--including Chaucer's ClT, KnT, and MerT in particular. The denouement of the latter may be read as May's inserting herself into January's family…

In striving to contextualize the portrait of the Yeoman in relation to real-world late medieval weaponry and hunting gear, critics overlook both the Yeoman's service as the "bearer" of aristocratic masculinity and the portrait's phallic humor. In…

The "complex" trouthe/routhe rhyme tracks the stages in the lovers' relationship: from its beginnings, when Troilus's trouthe is pledged for Criseyde's routhe; to its consummation, when mutual compassion assures reciprocal honesty and fidelity; to…

In both "Reson and Sensuallyte" and "Troy Book," Lydgate establishes the literary authority of English poetry by placing it in the "allegorical landscape" of the "Roman de la Rose." He frequently follows Chaucer's "method of Rose citation," while…

In HF, Chaucer's depictions of Venus's temple, the desert surrounding it, and the foundation of Fame's palace offer a vision of vernacular poetry that resembles glass. Like glass, such poetry is produced by transformation and translation of…

Through its "metafictional dialogue" between the teller and pilgrim narrator; its "inter-illumination" of genres, including anticlerical satire, oath making, and fabliau; and its depiction of a "carnival hell," FrT parodies and thus undermines the…

An examination of Skeat's Rime-Index to Chaucer's "Troilus and Criseyde" shows that "vowel length is an unneeded hypothesis" and Chaucer's vowels may be classified solely on the basis of "quality, not quantity."

Chaucer draws upon the festive tradition of mock saints early in TC to poke fun at "the pretensions of 'fin amor'"; as the poem progresses, the inversions of carnival come to represent "a necessary part of being a lover." By the time Troilus laughs…

The program of illustrations in the unique witness to "La Crónica Troyana de Alfonso XI" inadvertently undermines Alphonso XI's efforts to situate his people and himself within a "heroic, even mythical, past" and predicts the tragedy that would…

More critical attention to the codicological contexts, Latin sources, rhetorical devices, and clerical "authorial milieu" of Middle English lyrics would release them from the categories of the "practical or boring," and give their refinement and…

While vernacular precedents for Chaucer's satirical portrait of a pardoner have so far eluded scholars, five Latin exempla in a fourteenth-century French Dominican's collection, "Scala coeli," suggest that "the pardoner was already a type of the…

In Purse, For, and Scog, Chaucer employs the basic elements of an official 'supplicacio' "with great freedom, voicing them in a variety of unexpected ways."

In the context of medieval humoral symptomatology, Chaucer's Pardoner fits the profile of a phlegmatic male. This diagnosis explains, in turn, his corrupt character, for "incontinence, excess, deceitfulness, cowardice, and negligence" in a man were…

Adding to the work both of Spurgeon in "Five Hundred Years of Chaucer Criticism and Allusion" and of the author and Holton in "Chaucer's Fame in England," this annotated bibliography presents forty-five new citations, including one to a hitherto…

Expressions of hatred of Criseyde belie a persistent love for her and thus motivate new attempts at telling her story. In this way, hatred serves as "a sign of dispossession" of Criseyde "that invites repossession by the next author."

A case study of the difficulty of identifying particular manuscripts in inventories, wills, catalogues, book lists, etc., surveying the Middle English manuscripts once owned by seventeenth-century collector Sir James Ware, focusing on the items that…

Examines the varying degrees and uses of multilingualism among the Canterbury pilgrims and the characters in their tales, commenting on the facile "linguistic posing" of several speakers (Pardoner, Parson, Wife of Bath, Summoner and his characters)…

Reconsiders Laura Hibbard Loomis's method for gauging Chaucer's familiarity with the Auchinleck manuscript--a method based on collocations shared by Auchinleck and Th--arguing that the method does not prove his familiarity with Auchinleck, but does…

Focuses on how Chaucer was perceived in Scotland in the fifteenth century, and how deliberate misattributions of Chaucer's writings created a "vehicle for 'Scottish' culture, identity, and nationalism."

Aristotelian and Augustinian concepts of moral virtue illuminate Walter's and Griselda's behaviors in terms of habit and its relation to place.

Chaucer's translations of key phrases in the Griselda story reveal his use of the Boccaccio source material as a way to underscore the "complexity" of the story and the varied authorial voices involved in translation.

Chaucer's modification of Petrarch's Griselda material return ClT closer to Boccaccio's original version of the story. By working with multiple versions of the story, Chaucer places himself in the pantheon of Italian writers.