Browse Items (16371 total)

The pilgrims' decisions to address each other formally, as "you," or intimately, as "thou," reveal their attitudes about each other and their own social self-conceptions. Harry Bailly's central role, in terms both of the poem's structure and of…

Though we cannot recover the facts of Chaucer's versification,his lines in CT are basically iambic pentameter. Of the first hundred lines of GP in the Ellesmere MS., eighty may be so scanned with little difficulty.

The large amount of alliteration in narrative and lyric poetry of the courtly tradition, including Chaucer's poetry, is derived from certain veins of devotional prose of the thirteenth century.

Establishes that the "Breton" lay is a British lay composed by ancient Britons, not by minstrels of Brittany. The MED gives a British origin for most of its citations of "Britoun" and "Britaine." The validity of the sources for the other citations…

The "Song of Songs" has received little attention for its influence on other literary works. In two of CT tales, Chaucer exploits the allegorical interpretations of the "Song." The ambiguity of the interpretations in the Christian era made the…

Until mid-thirteenth century, the East was, in spite of some factual knowledge, the fabled land of Prester John. Then real travel in the Tartar empire gave Europe facts just as marvellous.

The name "Lollius" (from "loll" "to hang out the tongue") is Chaucer's punning attempt to imitate Boccaccio's name in English ("boccaccio" "ugly mouth"), as well as to create a plausible sounding Latinate name for his supposed author.

Hubertis M. Commings' dissertation (1914) denying that Chaucer knew the "Decameron" and an influential article by Willard Farnham (1924) positing that the work was not known in England until 1566 both are speciously reasoned. Chaucerian echoes of…

English scholars played an important part in transmitting Arabic learning to Europe. The "matter of Araby" may be set alongside the matters of Troy and Britain as an impulse in medieval English literature. It appears in Chaucer's MLT, Th, and the…

An anthology of selections from Voragine, Augustine, Macrobius, Hugh of St. Victor, Vainsauf, Garland, Bury, Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Cicero, Ovid, Deschamps, John of Salisbury, Ramon Lull, Saint-Amour, Boethius, Andreas Cappellanus, Walter Map,…

Pagan gods represent planetary influences, alchemic symbolism,psychological allegory of emotional states, and historical examples of virtues or vices. They also dramatize the worldliness of Chaucer's characters and relate it to the condition of…

Hunter describes a copy of the 1602 edition of Chaucer in his possession signed "A. Pope." The volume is defective, lacking the first gathering. The signature comes at the beginning of gathering B. There are no marginalia. Presumably this was a…

Both Chaucer and Gower expressed the sentiment that the world had grown old and cast the passing of time in moral terms. But they also ultimately relied on personal sensibilty to render the feeling or experience of time passing because they were not…

Clanvowe uses Chaucerian themes and conventions with deftness. He recognizes irony based on logic, characterizes through rhetoric, and employs all three conventional endings of debate form.

In the prefatory note to the 1592 "A Declaration of the True Causes" (STC 10005), there is an allusion to the pseudo-Chaucerian verses "Chaucer's Prophesie."

Unnoted allusions to Chaucer (and pseudo-Chaucer) in thirteen sixteenth-century works.

"The Isle of Ladies" was attributed to Chaucer until 1878. It is primarily a lover's complaint to his lady. The characters are based on Chaucerian models (like Criseyde) but play somewhat different roles.

Spenser and Chaucer both composed subtle, complex closures, spreading out before the audience several endings, like sections of a fan. Many medieval poems ended almost interchangeably in a formulaic prayer for salvation.

Lydgate's introduction of new critical terms and definitions--"enlumyn," "adourne," "enbelissche," "aureate," "goldyn," "sugrid," "rhetorik," and "elloquence"--shift poetry's emphasis from the variety and pleasure found in Chaucer's writings, to…

Although Heywood's comic debates are dismissed as negligible in metrical skill, once we realize that Chaucer's line is a non-pentameter, more dependent on alliterative accentual native verse than most metrists allow, then we can see that the debates…

Both Chaucer and Spenser make use of the qualified or unresolved ending. The outer limit of Chaucer's work is doctrine. Spenser seems to hold out hope for absolute vision.

Contrary to received opinion, the Wife of Bath argues implicitly for equality in marriage; she and the loathly lady in her tale gain dominance only to relinquish it. On the other hand, the Clerk, Merchant, and Franklin present views of women which…

French translation of GP, KnT, MilT, and NPT, the first part of a projected complete translation of CT.

The image of the merchant's wife waiting for him at the gate at the end of ShT (7.673-76) may be a reflection of a popular iconographic motif, the meeting of Anne and Joachim,parents of the Virgin Mary, at the Golden Gate of Jerusalem.

Chaucer's fictions show a logical development. The first are the "poetic fictions." In exploring the idea of authorial experience, the dream visions speculate on the poet's reaction to his audience and on the value of poetic activity. The second…