D. W. Robertson has already demonstrated the relationship between the Samaritan Woman (Matt. 4:4) and the Wife of Bath. But the similarities are even deeper, extending to an ironic typology of the harlot saved, including Mary Magdalene.
Mendelson, Anne.
Dissertation Abstracts International 39 (1978): 2295A.
The incongruity of the method of theological "quaestiones" (humble) in WBP with the Wife's aggressive, arbitrary approach and some of her orthodox assertions create the comic effect. WBT exhibits a transformation: the intellectual authority of the…
Sands, Donald B.
Chaucer Review 12 (1978): 171-82.
The Wife of Bath is neither a comic figure as Donaldson and others see her, nor a tragic figure as several other critics see her. Instead she is, as Beryl Rowland suggests, a neurotic and a misfit.
The interpretive problems with ClT--our ambivalence between human sympathy for Griselda and recognition of the poem's stern moral import--stem largely from the teller himself, whose additions to the source in Petrarch indicate that he does not fully…
Bloomfield, Morton W.
Siegfried Wenzel, ed. Medieval and Renaissance Studies. Proceedings of the Southeastern Institute of Medieval and Renaissance Studies (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978), pp. 37-50.
MerT is about limits and trangressions. January violates a limit marrying May; May violates moral limits; modes of parody and irony raze barriers between tragic and comic, making the tale its own anti-tale. The explicit cynicism and "realism" of…
Brown, Emerson, Jr.
Chaucer Review 13 (1978): 141-56.
MerT is not just a merry fabliau, uncomplicated by a fictional narrator. Through evidence included in the prologue, most of the first hundred and fifty lines, and various other passages in the work, we see that Chaucer may have consciously tried to…
Ewald, William B.,III.
English Language Notes 15 (1978): 267-68.
Robinson glosses Justinus' words "er ye have youre right of hooly chirche" (MerT, 1662) as "before your wedding is really solemnized." This should read "before your funeral is really solemnized."
Harty, Kevin J.
Ball State University Forum 19.2 (1978): 65-68.
In medieval tradition Esther is admirable and virtuous. She is invoked twice in MerT for the ironic comparison she offers to May, not as an undoer of men.
Keiser, George R.
Studies in Short Fiction 15 (1978): 191-92.
The use of the word "glad" (E2412) and its repetition (E2416) makes clear the moral point of the tale: happiness in marriage is possible for men, but only if they follow January's example of ignoring reality.
ShT contains within itself the opposing standards contrasted in KnT, MilT and RvT. The voice of ShT is more nearly Chaucer's own than in any of the more dramatically employed fabliaux.
Brumble, H. David,III.
Explicator 37.1 (1978): 45.
As Meyer Schapiro has noted, the mousetrap, associated with the Prioress in GP 145, is used by Augustine as a symbol of the cross that entraps the devil with the bait of Christ's flesh. The same allegory is found in Peter Lombard's "Sentences."
The Prioress is neither aristocratic, as Bowden, Manly, and Robinson argue, nor classless as Sister Madeleva posits, but a proto-Cockney and, thus, a typically round, contradictory Chaucerian character. With East London associations and dialect (her…
Chaucer's hedonist monk tells unexpectedly conservative tales. But his "accessus" and first four tales betray him as a "grammaticus" bent on "curiositas," evoked by hunting (Augustine) and "vagatio" (Peter Damian). The rest define "what is man" by…
Waller, Martha S.
Indiana Social Studies Quarterly 31 (1978): 46-55.
Though the authentic detail of Nero's golden fishnets passed unchanged into medieval tradition, the fiction of Julius Caesar's low birth is peculiar to English historians of the later Middle Ages. It apparently arose in "exempla" of Caesar's…
In miniature, the structure of NPT is that of CT. It begins and ends with the village and its folks, as CT was to begin and end with the Tabard Inn. The widow and her house are substituted for the Inn and the animals for the Pilgrims.
Keenan, Hugh T.
Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 79 (1978): 36-40.
The "snow" of food and drink in the Franklin's house evokes manna, which was like hoarfrost in the Bible, and therefore snow in medieval references. The result is eucharistic parody, discrediting the Franklin's feast.
Luengo, Anthony E.
Journal of English and Germanic Philology 77 (1978): 1-16.
The magic of the Orleans clerk is nothing but stage illusion achieved by natural means. The inability of the characters (and indeed of the narrator himself) to distinguish these harmless tricks from astrology and witchcraft reveal their cultural…
Kinney, Thomas L.
Literature and Psychology 28 (1978): 76-84.
PhyT has presented critics a problem. One way to account for it is to read it by dream analysis--as a dream-tale presenting the refusal of a girl to accept sexual maturation. Apius represents the power of sexual awakening,eros; the father her male…
Boyd, Heather.
English Studies in Africa 21 (1978): 65-69.
The rhetorical devices disavowed by the eagle in HF are NPT's substance which mocks badly used rhetoric: misapplied or mechanical or out of place. This mockery lies behind the Nun's Priest's anti-feminism, induced by the airs and graces of the…
NPT parodies the high, middle, and low styles of medieval rhetoric by allowing the animals to speak in all these styles. The animals speak in four styles of usage--intimate, conversational, didactic, and literary.
Milosh, Joseph.
Contemporary Literature 19 (1978): 48-57.
Gardner strikingly alters "Beowulf" by granting Grendel spiritual development, by portraying the absurdity of war, and by undercutting the validity of poetic making. The changes transforms epic material into an elusive genre characterized by its…
Glasser, Marc D.
Tennessee Studies in Literature 23 (1978): 1-14.
Contrary to Donald Howard, who found in SNT the church's "highest ideal" of marriage and Chaucer's final answer to the Marriage Group, the tale actually denies the basis of true wedlock as subordinating the wife's personal concern for her husband to…
Reames, Sherry L.
Modern Philology 76 (1978): 111-35.
Combining Bosio's edition of the "Passio S. Caeciliae" and the "Legenda Aurea" accounts for all but eight discountable details of SNT and,independently, for the English analogues. Chaucer adapts rather than translates.
