Browse Items (16376 total)

Highlights the amount of potential material in The National Archives as compared to more traditional repositories for high-value manuscripts. Considers approaches to find and use this material with new examples for Chaucer, Gower, and Skelton.

Highlights the utility of proverbs and offers them as a solution to the problem of knowledge in SqT. Emphasizes that proverbs provide new insights for late medieval textual cultures as a microgenre that transcends social and economic boundaries in…

Examines the last stanza of TC, the first three lines of which are translated almost verbatim from Dante''s "Paradiso" (14.28-30), and argues that the ending not only affirms Chaucer's debt to Dante, but is crucial for an understanding of the poem.…

Focuses on the word "queynte" in MilT to explore the challenges translators face when rendering modernizations that are descriptively and stylistically true to original Middle English texts. Insists that to achieve the correct level of politeness or…

Contends SqT and Thopas are not artistic failures but that their departures from the usual norms of the medieval romance genre in tone, form, and subject matter are evidence of Chaucer's search "for a new mode of romance writing." Further, their…

Explores "important tensions" in the characterization of the Wife of Bath, interpreting the "larger subject" of WBT as the "grace of God," even though it concludes with the Wife's "irreligious" final curse. In WBP, her "masking is predictable…

Traces the allusion to a "panyer ful of herbes" in MerT (4.1568) to an oral version of the apocryphal "Life of Aesop," commenting on the implications of this source for the tale.

Argues that we do not know whether or not Damian completed the act of copulation in the pear tree of MerT, impregnating May, despite Emerson Brown's claims that he did neither. More important are the facts that January has been cuckolded and that he…

Tallies books and articles pertaining to Chaucer--ones in progress, completed, and/or published in 1970.

Cites examples from Middle English literary texts to support reading "secte" as meaning "petition" or legal suit in ClT 4.1171, referring to the Wife of Bath's argument.

Reads the "growth and decline" of friendship between Troilus and Pandarus in TC as an ongoing commentary on the love affair between Troilus and Criseyde; both relationships indicate worldly impermanence.

Comments on the meanings and referents of "tretys" in MelP and in Ret, suggesting that the first usage is not particularly doctrinal and that the second refers to ParsT rather than CT as a whole.

Argues that ClT reveals the teller's "professional, speculative turn of mind" in contrast with the Wife of Bath's "rigorous sort of pragmatism," commenting on the Clerk's "academic terminology," his academic "awkwardness," and Walter's trial of…

Shows that the GP establishes a comic-satirical tone for the CT that is "indirect . . . shifting and multiple." In this light, ParsT "represents a way of seeing the world," but not the only one; the standard posed by the Parson is not an absolute…

Shows that double entendre "invests the entire narrative action" of RvT, explicating individual puns and demonstrating the prevalence of the sexual implications of flour, milling, and grinding throughout the tale and in later works by John Heywood…

Examines the "distorted reflection or negative image" of the Christian mass in PardPT and in the GP description of the Pardoner, showing how the language, imagery, and details of the liturgy of the mass run throughout the Pardoner's materials,…

Treats PhyT as an instance of Chaucer's use of "indirection" when applying a moral to an exemplary narrative. Like ManT in this respect (also ClT, NPT, and part of TC), and unlike its analogues in Livy, Gower, and the "Roman de la Rose," PhyT closes…

Explores how and where features of various genres inform the characterization, tone, atmosphere, and meaning of ClT, treating it as a scene in the "Canterbury drama," an exemplum of worldly and cosmic obedience, a fairy tale, a realistic novella, and…

The astrological details of "Complaint of Mars" indicate that in the anthropomorphic action of the poem Venus betrays Mars and becomes the mistress of Mercury, "eternally re-enact[ing] the eternal myth."

A report of new projects, projects in progress, and membership of Chaucer Library Committee.

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…

Assesses the Pardoner as a "puzzle" posed by Chaucer to challenge his audience to consider the relationship between morality and story-telling. The Pardoner's dazzling rhetoric, his relics, and the tensions between his immoral prologue and moral tale…

Tallies Chaucer's modifications of his sources in ManT, especially the digressions he adds, to show that the "subject of the tale is language." In his tale, the Manciple "sneers at" people who "can be distracted from empirical reality by language,"…

Suggests that Chaucer purges "sensuality" from Boccaccio's "Filostrato" when he adapts it as TC, and demonstrates in detail where the quality is consistently present in the Boccaccio's poem.

Argues that Troilus' ascent to the eighth sphere (TC 5.1807-27) combines Christian and pagan elements--the classical pagan notion of immortality among the stars transmitted to Chaucer via Alain de Lille, Dante, and Boccaccio, and the Christian…