Browse Items (16472 total)

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.

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.

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…

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.

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.

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…

FranT line 5(F).1204 equals "The Tempest" 4.1, "our revels now are ended."

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…

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.

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…

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…

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.

Resemblances between Aelfric's and Chaucer's versions of the St. Cecilia legend suggest a common Latin source, possibly Mombritius' "Passio." But Chaucer's treatment, different from Aelfric's especially in dealing with the crowns of flowers, is more…

"Wyn ape" in ManT (9.44) should be taken as "fool's wine." The Manciple had drugged the Cook in order to prevent him from betraying his (the Manciple's) chicanery, and in the Headlink, he serves him with an antidote.

"Pace" Allen's and Sayce's ironies, dramatic and symbolic propriety for ParsT require penance, and predict, by the figure of the supper and the Host's unwitting use of Pauline imagery, an eschatological end.

Comparison with contemporary documents show ParsT to be a manual for penitents; homiletic elements are minimal and the appeal is to reason rather than the emotions. Despite numerous minor inconsistencies ParsT has a clear and effective structure. …

"De casibus" tragedy stems from a single event which determines the protagonist's career. By contrast, the genre of TC is Boethian, depicting multiple crises in the lives of its characters with no single experience as the crucial one. The story of…

Criseyde's characterization and role in Chaucer's fiction define the way Nature herself looks and functions in the world. Troilus and Pandarus as "priests of Nature" cannot reconcile their image of her with a nature that is "slyding of corage."

Although Pandarus did not appear in literature until Boccaccio's "Il Filostrato," 1336, by 1440 his name had degenerated into a common noun in English. This rapid development argues against the dualism and complexity modern critics find in him. The…

In Criseyde's debate on whether to take Troilus as a lover (2.598-812), the word "thought" occurs fourteen times, the most dense usage in the poem, reflective of Criseyde's practice of thinking before acting. In contrast, "thought" in Troilus' case…