Browse Items (16376 total)

The function of wells and streams in Chaucer's use of the garden "topos" suggests that, where the secular materials are drawn from the courtly love tradition, as in PF and very largely in MerT, religious echoes expose the illusiveness or inadequacy…

The simile applied to the Friar--"His nekke 'whit' was 'as the flour-de-lys'"--functions externally and internally. The outward sign of his neck is symbolic of his inner degraded state of mind, which shows physiognomically a mark of licentiousness…

Emphasis on Chaucer's use of symbols.

Chaucer's figurative language is mostly traditional, but its effect usually transcends the merely visual: it is emotional and intellectual--aiming at more than concrete realism. Often, however, the nature of this imagery eludes us because Chaucer's…

El is based on Hg, the first published text. Hg arranged the thirteen apparently unrelated fragments of the one copytext left by Chaucer not by geographical and chronological features which exercise modern critics but by a sequence of…

The explanation for the condition of quire 10 in CT is that the leaves became disarranged after the scribe had completed the first half. The order that resulted from his error was ii-iii-i-iv-v-vi. After this faulty order was corrected, the order…

Virgule placement in the Hengwrt and Ellesmere mss. is highly regular. Syntactic and metrical rules can be used to predict 80 percent of the placements. The two mss agree in virgule placement 77 percent of the time. The 23 percent rate of…

Chaucer is careful to dwell on the pilgrimage to Canterbury as an interior, not merely as an exterior, experience, thus giving it an allegorical significance. This allegory can be seen as twofold: a journey from reason to faith and a movement from…

Since Kittredge, we have come to see a dramatic structure at the heart of CT, with interaction not only among the tellers but also among the tales themselves. Many points, however, are still in dispute: the order of the tales, the question of…

The advance of the fabliaux in critical estimation is perhaps the major development of twentieth-century Chaucer studies. The fabliau--an "upper"-class genre ridiculing the buffoneries of the "lower" classes and clergy--flourished in…

In CT Chaucer defines and redefines "myrie tale." Ultimately it is neither mere entertainment, nor pure instruction, not even sentence and solace. A truly "myrie tale" must be "fructuous," i.e., truly edifying. Only ParsT fits, for poetry is…

Chaucer's romances include KnT, SqT, WBT, FranT, and Th; but "Chaucer's realism, humor, and interest in character all tend to transform his romances into something beyond what one usually finds in the genre."

Chaucer is the rule for vernacular poets rather than the exception. His appropriation of monastic patterns of thought and ascetic ideas and imagery were a tradition already becoming a classic in his time. In CT, the Summoner's portrait, the…

The much-disputed allegorical criticism of CT is a fairly recent phenomenon. Chaucer's allegories maybe either "formal" (e.g., ClT) or "informal" (e.g., KnT)--both styles deriving from "a reservoir of established menaings shared by the poet and his…

Irony--"the Chaucerian pose"--is of five basic types in CT: verbal, structural, dramatic, and philosophic irony, as well as irony of manner.

Marriage has important positive values in medieval narrative, including Chaucer's. The "Marriage Group" constitutes not so much a debate over sexual dominance in marriage as a varied demonstration of the need for mutual consideration and…

Kittredge's dialectical interpretation of the Marriage Group in CT is re-examined in terms of the different views presented by W. W. Lawrence, D. R. Howard, J. L. Hodge, and C. C. Olson. The conclusion is that there seems little to be revised in…

GP not only is a brilliant poem in itself but also sets the tone for the entire work to follow. It skillfully blends the real with the ideal world--all seen through the device of a narrative persona. Chaucer uses several devices for description,…

The fundamental distinction in KnT is not between Palamon and Arcite, but between them and Theseus. The Dionysian misrule of Thebes is symbolically contrasted to the Apollonian order or Athens. The mythic structure of the narrative prepares a…

KnT is a scholastic romance whose primary subject is universal human nature conceived in varying combinations of will and intellect, and its overriding concern is human freedom. From its position as the first Canterbury tale, one might infer that…

Twice the carpenter in MilT uses "astromye": is it a malapropism, an acceptable variant, or a scribal error? Since according to Manly-Rickert all mss of CT record "astromye," the last of these is not tenable. And since the word thus misused does…

Although giving the impression of belonging to the world of courtesy, "deerne love" is actually more pertinent to the activities detailed in fabliaux. But secrecy, even when it would appear to be taken seriously, causes destruction of love and…

Despite Tolkien's praise of Chaucer's "accurate observation" of dialects in RvT, examination of the mss of CT reveals that Chaucer's knowledge of northern dialect was in no way exceptional and that many of the northern speech characteristics of the…

An edition, with introduction, notes, and glossay.

Chaucer's version of MLT is more like Trevet's than the folktale version identified as "The Handless Maiden." If Chaucer knew this folktale version, his choice of Trevet's more sophisticated version is another tribute to his art.