Browse Items (16346 total)

Bakhtinian analysis of references to garlands and garlanding in KnT and A Midsummer Night's Dream. Greenwood traces the classical traditions of garlands of love and glory, arguing that depictions of both "veer towards negative criticism" in these two…

According to Walker, the three males in MilT anticipate familiar types of masculine "fool" in English dramatic tradition: John as cuckolded senex amans, Nicholas as the punished "Priapic fool," and Absolon as the "squeamish, infantalised male."…

Argues that, in select romances, Chaucer confronts "serious matters"--political, social, ethical, and aesthetic--and experiments with the range and flexibility of the genre, comparing KnT and WBT as metacritical romances that interrogate their own…

Sets Middle English romances "in the context of late medieval patterns of family and marriage, and presents them as part of a literate but unlearned lay culture centered on the home." Briefly discusses Thop and TC.

Argues that Chaucer, the Gawain poet, and Malory use women to define chivalric male identities. The texts of these authors register anxiety about women as "hominis confusio" and marginalize women by marginalizing many of the moments of their greatest…

Though there may never have been a "doctrine" of courtly love,late-medieval literature reflects conventions that may be called courtly.

Exemplifies how Chaucer "has a great deal of fun with the coalescence of medieval arithmetic, geometry and logic into a single discipline more recognizable today as mathematics," exploring the "proto-probabilistic" dicing and poison-bottle selection…

The portrayal of "faire White" in BD reflects the double vision--physical and metaphysical--of rhetorical description in Geoffrey of Vinsauf, Joseph of Exeter, and Alain de Lille.

Lancashire uses computer-assisted analysis to tabulate recurring words and phrases in Chaucer's writings. The frequency and patterns of repeated words and their collocations identify Chaucer's preoccupations, distinctive features of his writing and…

Usk's "Testament of Love" relies on Chaucer's translation of Bo and his literary reworking of philosophy in TC, but it reflects even more significantly Chaucer's innovations in writing nondevotional, apolitical, self-consciously literary prose texts.

Wheel iconography associated with Hugh of Foilloy's treatise, "The Wheel of True and False Religion," may have influenced the plotting of the divided fart in SumT.

Growing out of the Parliament of 1386 and subsequent confrontations between Richard II and his subjects, arguments over the nature of royal and representative authority shape the portrayal in MLT of pagan savagery, Northumbrian custom, Providential…

Reassesses the implications of the two copies of the quitclaim pertaining to Cecily Champain and Chaucer, clarifying the meaning of "quitclaim," describing the process of issuing claims in the medieval period, and arguing that Champain issued two…

Proposes that "purposeful" alienation that was characteristic of humanist thinking between the twelfth and seventeenth centuries: contempt for the world that belies an underlying fascination with it. Assesses the presence of the sentiment in several…

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.

According to literary theorists, writers were able either to rework sources or more easily, to invent new matter. In the former method, the poet had to work the original idea anew, avoiding too close imitation, errors, and confusion. In SqT, the…

Critical studies of NPT fall primarily into two groups: allegorical, or interpretive readings, versus mock-epic, or "noninterpretive" readings, based on the premise that the poem has "no meaning except its escape from meaning."

Both the world and the language with which we try to render it intelligible are in constant flux. Tracing changes in the word "thrift" from pre-Chaucerian times through Shakespeare,Knapp stresses the necessity for developing strategies of capturing…

The language and imagery with which the Cook denounces Perkyn's revelry in CkT evoke the rhetoric with which contemporary writers denounced the so-called Peasants' Revolt of 1381. Perkyn's revelry may seem "innocuous" to readers today, but "the…

Collette examines the tradition of Mariology in relation to PrPT and SNPT. In their "Prologues," the Prioress and the Second Nun invoke the Virgin "as a figure of virtuous female power and speech." In their "Tales," however, women and children die…

From the dream visions through CT, Chaucer never abandoned his fascination with walls and "enclosed fictions." On the one hand, walls function metaphorically, representing such forces as the rise and fall of civilization. On the other, they create…

Carruthers explores the role of memory, one of the five divisions of classical rhetoric, in composing and understanding medieval poetry. Works such as "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" and Chaucer's KnT are "memory-friendly" because images…

Critics have attributed Chaucer's description of naval warfare in the Legend of Cleopatra to his knowledge of contemporary battles. Hamel argues instead that Chaucer, like other medieval writers and even historians, drew the elements of his…

Examines the encomium on marriage in MerT and the speech on marital values in FranT. In their structural placements and their relations with their sources, the speeches do not so much critique or assert specific views on marriage as represent…

Considers whether the Prioress was capable of "love celestial," examining her invocation to the Virgin Mary and suggesting that the heaviness of Mary's pregnancy is analogous to the Prioress's need to be delivered of her tale. In PrT, "affective…