Gathers together previously known documents concerning Cecily Chaumpaigne with newly discovered documents. Documents are transcribed and translations provided.
Focuses on RvT and argues that newly discovered documents allow scholars to move beyond Chaucer's individual blame and address structural issues and concerns with language describing and depicting sexual assault in late medieval texts.
Harris, Carissa M.
Chaucer Review 57 (2022): 475-83.
In light of newly discovered documents surrounding Cecily Chaumpaigne, calls for more attention to the servant women depicted in Chaucer's texts and the use of the word "endure" in his corpus.
Reflects on the newly discovered documents in the case of Cecily Champagne, and contends that, regardless of whether Chaucer was to blame, medieval studies and Chaucerian critics remain at fault if they excused Chaucer on account of his poetry.…
Roger, Euan, and Andrew Prescott
Chaucer Review 57 (2022): 498-526.
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.…
Jucker, Andreas H.
Seiler, Annina.
Chaucer Review 58, no. 1 (2023): 35-59.
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…
Newby, Rebecca Ellen.
Chaucer Review 58, no. 1 (2023): 60-88.
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…
Shapiro, Gloria K.
Chaucer Review 6 (1971): 130-41.
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…
Von Kreisler, Nicholai.
Chaucer Review 6.1 (1971): 30-37.
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.
Beidler, Peter G.
Chaucer Review 6.1 (1971): 38-43.
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…
Baird, Joseph L.
Chaucer Review 6.2 (1971): 117-19.
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.
Grennen, Joseph E.
Chaucer Review 6.2 (1971): 81-93.
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…
Miller, Clarence H., and Roberta Bux Bosse.
Chaucer Review 6.3 (1972): 171-84.
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…
Utley, Francis Lee.
Chaucer Review 6.3 (1972): 198-228.
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…
Laird, Edgar S.
Chaucer Review 6.3 (1972): 229-31.
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."
