Browse Items (16346 total)

Traces backgrounds to the coral beads held by the Prioress (GP 1.158-59), both as an amulet against evil and a charm for earthly love, also found in John Donne's "Sonnet. The Token," lines 10-12.

Argues that Chaucer's personal experience of the 1386 Parliament influenced his depiction of parliamentary activity in TC (4.141ff.), detailing events of the historical parliament, Chaucer's likely feelings about it, and changes and additions Chaucer…

Locates a satiric pun on "doghty" as either "valiant" or "dough-like" in Th 7.724-25.

Aligns details of GP 1.361-78 with historical evidence to argue that the five tradesmen or "Burgesses" described by Chaucer belonged to a "craft fraternity [rather than a parish fraternity] and that the Drapers' Fraternity (or Brotherhood of St. Mary…

Suggests emending LGWP-G by reversing the order of lines 135 and 136 and making "obeysaunce" plural in 135.

A close reading of the structure, themes, and rich characterizations of TC, examined in comparison with its primary source, Boccaccio's "Filostrato," and with sustained attention to ancillary sources and Chaucer's particular emphases, especially the…

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Critiques attempts to modernize Chaucer's verse for the sake of the "common reader," preferring Augustan "imitations" to twentieth-century renderings in verse or prose, but finding them all to be relatively dull and incapable of replicating Chaucer's…

Tabulates and assesses the uses of singular "ye" and "thou" in CT, considering usage norms, rhyme patterns, and scribal variants, and identifying patterns of high incidence of "incorrect" usage in CYPT, KnT, WBP, and Mel, while ParsT is also highly…

Argues that "gentilesse" is the main concern of SqT, linked to the sub-themes of integrity, mercy, education, truthful rhetoric, youthfulness, and social class.

Corroborates and extends Carleton Brown's effort to show (in 1937) that the MLH was intended to introduce the first story in the CT, exploring evidence and counter-evidence for positing an "original opening sequence" as follows: GP, MLH, Mel, MLE,…

Describes several "difficulties" in the close reading of medieval poetry, and then examines complex "interplay between the real and apparent plots" of "Pity," reading the addressee as both a Lady and as an abstract emption, and tracing shifting…

Suggests that several details of the Wife of Bath's chiding of her elder husbands (WBP 3.257-62) derive, ultimately, from Isidore of Saville's "Etymologiarum."

Analyzes the dialect forms and textual variants of the "Tale of Gamelyn" in four of the twenty-five CT manuscripts that contain it (Ha4 Cp La Pw), arguing that, in "Gamelyn," these manuscripts evince a textual tradition and editorial practice which…

Compares Chaucer's version of Hermengyld's miracle in MLT 2.554-74 with analogous passages in Trevet's and Gower's versions of the Constance story, suggesting that one stanza is missing from Chaucer's account, perhaps due to scribal error.

Reviews J. A. W. Bennett's 1957 book "The Parlement of Foules: An Interpretation," exploring the weaknesses and strengths of his critical methodology and application.

Identifies a series of analogues to the book-burning episode in WBP 3.816 in eastern versions of the "Seven Sages" (or "Books of Sindibad"), identifying similarities and differences between them and Chaucer's account, and suggesting that oral…

Exemplifies how several features of the characterization of Chaunticleer in NPT are "firmly grounded in medieval natural history," particularly his "uxoriousness, regal pride, and choleric temperament," as well as his connections with preaching, all…

Observes that NPT differs from most of its cock-and-fox analogues "in its explicit, reiterated warning against flattery," a traditional feature of, instead, "fox-and-crow" tales. Also, the explicitness of the moral in NPT is a "convention…

Explores resonances between the characterization of Chaucer's Prioress in GP and the life and legend of St. Eligius, clarifying how the Prioress's swearing by "Seint Loy" (i.e., Eligius; GP 1.120) is both appropriate and highly ironic.

Argues that the "citole" held in Venus's right hand in KnT 1.1959 evinces the influence of "the 'Ovidius moralizatus' of Petrus Berchorius (Pierre Bersuire)," and explores the possibilities of other influences on the depictions of Venus in KnT and in…

Provides textual evidence to confirm that the three portions of the Middle English Rom--A, B, and C--derive from different manuscript groupings of their French source, the "Roman de la Rose," corroborating arguments that the three portions were…

Explores unanswered questions about Chaucer's knowledge of Petrarch and use of Petrarchan material in TC 1.400-420 and in ClT, focusing on close reading of Chaucer's "deviations" from Petrarch's Sonnet 132 in his translation of it in TC, with…

Explores nuances of medieval "wild" and "hare" to clarify Chaucer's "joke" about Thopas's hunting in Th 7.755-56.

Explores paradoxes of thematic and structural order in KnT--the "mechanical" ups and downs of Fortune, the narrator's control, the human order of design and progression, accumulative resonances of Boethian material, and the "logic, justice, and order…