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Constance is not, as Delany (1974) claims, a character who embodies and recommends self-degradation and abject submission to power in all its forms. What is important is that Constance discovers in the course of her experience that Providence, not…

Previous criticism often finds an unresolved tension between tale and teller in MLT and in the tale itself, leading a critic like Edward A. Block to declare the work "poor art." However, the admitted tensions within the tale between a feeling of…

The story of Constance is not especially appropriate to the Man of Law. Chaucer was attracted to it because it is a good piece of fiction and because it gave him the perfect opportunity to set forth and justify his belief in astrology. The story…

Constance is not the passive ninny she has been accused of being. She possesses a presence which demands and receives forcible response; she moves in her world with self-sufficiency; her virtue is heroic; her ability to accept what God sends gives…

Past opinions are either that Chaucer was profoundly involved with the tale and reflected the period's emotionalism or that he was detached and disenchanted with the narrator. Actually the tale is an exposure of the "publicly sentimentalizing…

Recent proposals that Alisoun and Jankyn may have murdered her fourth husband are analyzed and rejected. Their quarrel arises not from mutual guilt but from Jankyn's suspicions about Alisoun, and from his association of murder and female lust. Such…

The Wife of Bath has served as an example of a medieval feminist. However, it would be more accurate to describe her as an androgyne--a person possessing both male and female characteristics. While it can be argued that she has liberated herself…

An important immediate source of Chaucer's work is in the Latin "Lamentations of Matheolus," a thirteenth-century French cleric, whose work Jean le Fevre translated into French and expanded in the fourteenth century. In excess of one hundred…

The Wife of Bath is, in B. J. Whiting's phrase, "an oxymoron in the flesh," and modern structuralist criticism helps us to see the mythic implications of her parodies of Paul's dicta concerning marriage, apostolic experience, and beatific vision.

The Friar's varied activities are recounted in terms that have both commercial and non-materialistic applications. Ambigous diction points toward deeper questions about the use of wealth and, together with the sexual innuendoes and the enumeration…

Archer Taylor's account, in "Sources and Analogues," of the analogues to FrT is incomplete and misleading. Exempla from two fourteenth-century English manuscript collections show that it is possible to be much more precise about Chaucer's…

Griselda's several robings and disrobings are used to suggest the difficulty of knowing the constant reality behind shifting appearances. The behavior of Griselda and Walter becomes more coherent through the different meanings they see in clothing: …

Rhetorically nearer to exhortation than to encomium, the didactic structure of this passage (4.1267-1392) rises in a series of contradictions that confuse doctrines and undercut ironic perceptions. None of the proposed assignments of the passage…

In the Merchant and MerT Chaucer objectifies his own cultural bias against women and his own interest in financial profit. The Merchant is like January (Janus was the god of merchants), and Chaucer (born into a family of merchants) is like the…

Glosses in Class Alpha mss of Claudian's "De Raptu Proserpinae," which Chaucer could have used at school, explain his description of Pluto and Proserpina as Fairies, his "many a lady" following Proserpina, the terrifying tone of Pluto's "grisely…

A previously uncollected analogue emerges in the form of a joke in Kansas. Structural parallels include the motivating action, the consummation in a tree, and the refusal of the husband to believe the evidence of his own eyes.

Sixteen essays by various authors. For individual essays that pertain to Chaucer, search for Chaucerian Problems and Perspectives under Alternative title.

FranT, although a declared romance, has been judged almost universally by real-life standards of conduct in marriage. Two real-life women of Chaucer's period, Margaret Paston and Christine de Pizan, provide a standard of conduct in their own…

Richard Lanham's game ("play") theories contribute to an understanding of FranT and PardT. The study of rhetoric as game emphasizes Chaucer's creative vision rather than a moral vision.

The eighth-century legend of St. Balred, who moved a rock dangerous to sailors, may have suggested to Chaucer the motif for Aurelius' task.

In his "Physicall and approved Medicines..." (London, 1611) Edmund Gardiner cites Galfridus Chaucer as one of his authorities and quotes a version of GP, I (A), 443-44: "For Gold in Physicke is a cordiall: / Wherefore he loved Golde in speciall."

If the Pardoner is taken as a hermaphrodite, it is easier to approach the question of how he can explain his false practices and still expect his listeners to be taken in by them. According to late medieval writers, the hermaphrodite's dual nature…

The likelihood that Chaucer in ShT was consciously punning on "cousin"/"cozen" is increased by the appearance of such a pun in a "ronde" which belongs to a special subgroup of "chansons de mal marie(e)."

Chaucer's characterization of the Prioress mirrors the struggle of "a country bumpkin trying to upgrade herself." The St. Loy of her oath might best be identified with St. Louis IX, King of France. The Bell edition of 1890 cites St. Loy as the…

Lines 1748-54 (558-64) of PrT are a "tour de force" of sustained onomatopoetic alliteration, with thirty-one ("recte," thirty-two) sibilants, in hissing imitation of "the serpent Sathanas." Chaucer's artistry here is more subtle and varied than in…