Although the prevailing code of honor was belligerent, Chaucer's dissatisfaction with this aggressive style is subtly indicated in Truth, Mars, Th, and KnT by presentation of "heroic" actions and martial "worshippe" as slightly ridiculous. In Mel,…
The medieval tyrant "topos," with its lexicon and its various transformations, provides the means of studying Chaucer's moral vocabulary. The tyrant figure embodies passion, cruelty, injustice, and the heartlessness. Its antitype is first that of…
McCall, John P.
University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1979.
Discusses the ways in which Chaucer uses classical materials in comedy, tragedy, and allegory; in theme, action, and character, to make available the world of Virgil, Ovid, and Lucan--sometimes through Dante, Graunson, Boccaccio, and Froissart.
Olson, Glending.
Comparative Literature 31 (1979): 272-90.
Chaucer's distinction between "makere" and "poete" is found elsewhere in medieval writings. Serving both to separate classical from contemporary and to distinguish artistic quality from moral seriousness, the distinction suggests the relationship…
A general guide to fourteenth-century music in France, Italy, and Britain. The main composers, musical forms, and centers of musical activity are surveyed and illustrated in facsimiles, pictures, and music examples. Musical references in Chaucer's…
The fifteenth-century MS Fairfax 16, considered the finest of the Oxford Group of Chaucer manuscripts, contains BD, HF, Anel, Mars, and PF. Regarding the frontispiece, a mythological illumination for Mars, Norton-Smith advances a new theory of…
Ruggiers, Paul G., ed. with introductions by Donald C. Baker, A. I. Doyle, and M. B. Parkes.
Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1979.
Designed as the basic text of CT for the "Variorum Chaucer," a facsimile of the Hengwrt, which may have been produced in Chaucer's lifetime, one of the earliest and most reliable of the manuscripts of the CT.
In KnT, Chaucer presents Arcite's love sickness in scientific terms. Boccaccio reveals Arcite to be changed into a savage-looking creature, whereas Chaucer's description recreates the ideal world of chivalry.
KnT offers a reflection of several problems in late fourteenth-century society and of a judge and commentator, Theseus, who is free because he can rationally interpret history. Through KnT and its inversion in MilT, Chaucer offers a mythos of peace…
Yamanaka, Toshio.
Sophia English Studies 4 (1979): 11-22.
The keywords to determine Theseus's roles in KnT are "lord," "governour," "conquerour," "hunter," "servant," and "judge." Theseus is analogous to Mars, Venus, and Diana, as "conquerour," "servant," and "hunter," symbolized in his construction of the…
Schwartz, Robert B.
Zeitschrift fur Anglistik und Amerikanistik 27 (1979): 43-51.
Damyan is seen as a type of fourteenth-century Robin Hood, who presided over May revels and mated with the May queen, and who was prosecuted under vagrancy laws which Chaucer may have enforced.
The Middle Ages provided two contrasting traditions in the characterization of Hector, one celebrating his heroism, the other viewing him as possessed of physical flaws and spiritual debilities. In TC, Chaucer combines the two traditions in his…
Mars is placed within Christian moral interpretation when Mars refers to lovers as fish caught on a hook. Asking why God made human love enticing, Mars inverts the "hierarchy of human and divine lovers." For him the love bait on the hook is not…
Shippey, T. A.
Times Literary Supplement (London), Nov. 30, 1979, pp. 73-74.
Medieval scholarship and criticism suffers from reading texts without contexts, allowing modern perspectives to influence the interpretation of medieval writers, and careless translation.
Mack, Maynard.
Rene Welleck and Alvaro Ribeiro, eds. Evidence of Literaary Scholarship (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), pp. 105-21.
Pope's copy of Chaucer, with his own youthful annotations, still survives. And though his marking of the text shows careful perusal of it (especially Rom), these early annotations are ultimately not very revealing of Pope's maturer feelings about…
Andreas, James R.
Chaucer Newsletter 1.1 (1979): 3-6.
Reviews, by way of the anthropological studies of Turner and van Gennep, the effects of pilgrimage on the social behavior of the pilgrims in CT. Pilgrimage removes them from the center of normative social behavior: it homogenizes social rank, blurs…
Kelly, Henry Ansgar.
Chaucer Newsletter 1.2 (1979): 6-10.
Argues that Chaucer's St. Valentine is a Genoese Saint Valentine whose feast was May 2, and not the Valentine of February 14. Thus the appropriateness of spring imagery.
Chaucer defines the "up-so-doun" world using three devices: dramatized "impossibilia" (the rhetorical expression of a passionate conviction believed to be an impossibility), role reversal (involving a triumph of the weaker over the stronger), and…
Argues that Chaucer was famous in the 15th and 16th centuries not as a love poet but as a visionary poet, a dreamer of dream allegories, and as such influenced Lydgate ("Temple of Glas"), Skelton ("Garland of Laurel"), Cowley ("Dream of Elysium"),…
Higgs, Elton D.
Mid-Hudson Language Studies 2 (1979): 28-43.
The tension between Harry Bailly's governance over the pilgrims and the tolerance and permissiveness of Chaucer's fictional narrative voice is implied in three link passages: between KnT and MilT, in the Prologue to MLT, and in the Prologue to ParsT.…
