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.…
Sleeth, Charles (R.)
Chaucer Newsletter 1.2 (1979): 20-21.
In GP the Franklin and the Man of Law are presented as companions, but they have antithetical views on astrology: the Man of Law insists on its value, the Franklin condemns it as "supersticious cursednesse."
Reisner, M. E.
Chaucer Newsletter 1.2 (1979): 19-20.
Adduces reports that St. Joce's relics were brought to Winchester (Hyde Abbey) in 901. The abbot of Hyde lived next to the real Tabard Inn and Chaucer may have introduced St. Joce into WBP as a bit of local lore.
Schulenburg, Jane Tibbetts.
Julia A. Sherman and Evelyn Torton Beck, eds. The Prism of Sex: Essays in the Sociology of Knowledge (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1979), pp. 33-53.
One of the best and earliest observations of the basic distortion of history with regard to women and their roles is made by the Wife of Bath (III, 688-96). Christine de Pisan makes a comparable but more elaborate statement of the mistreatment of…
The headwear of the Wife of Bath and of the Pardoner, in light of I Cor. 11:3-12, links the two pilgrims symbolically, both rejecting their proper sex roles and thus simultaneously flouting Paul's distinction between male and female and literalizing…
Besserman, Lawrence [L.]
Chaucer Newsletter 1.1 (1979): 15-16.
Argues that GP 259-62, 642-43, and TC II, 36-37 are allusions to the Great Schism: the Friar like a pope in his "'double' worstede"; the pope like a popinjay (of two voices?), and the proverb that more than one way leads to Rome.
Zellefrow, W. Ken.
Chaucer Newsletter 1.1 (1979): 12-15.
Traces broad similarities between FrT and the Robin Hood ballads to suggest that Chaucer knew early forms of the ballads and adapted them for comic effect.
The vernicle, an image of Christ, reminds us that man is made in God's image, and emphasizes the Pardoner's perversion of that image, both morally and spiritually. Yet it also provides hope that the Pardoner may reform himself.
