Cowen, J.M.
Notes and Queries 229 (1984): 298-301.
The wording of these lines closely resembles the phraseology found in an Italian translation of Ovid's "Heroides." The line "Youre anker which ye in oure haven leyde" (line 2501) may be a sexual pun. Treats Boccaccio's "De genealogia deorum" as…
Cowen, Janet (M.)
Julia Boffey and Janet Cowen, eds. Chaucer and Fifteenth-Century Poetry. King's College London Medieval Studies, no. 5 (London: King's College Centre for Late Antique and Medieval Studies, 1991), pp. 51-65.
Discusses exemplary use of Medea in classical and medieval traditions, suggesting connections with Boccaccio's De claris mulieribus and Christine de Pisan's Book of the City of Ladies. Also notes comparisons among LGW, Lydgate's versions of the…
Cowen, Janet M.
Derek Pearsall, ed. Manuscripts and Texts (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1987), pp. 26-33.
In editing Chaucer, the problem of the final "-e" can be resolved "in a conservative edition by retaining the spelling of the base manuscript and in a modernised edition by regularising it." Cowen and George Kane, editors of LGW (in progress), treat…
Cowen, Janet M.
Studies in Philology 82 (1985): 416-36.
In LGW, Chaucer uses the narrative approaches of hagiography (brevity, narrative selection, and focus for commemorative and edificational purpose) to achieve variations in tone and perspective. The heroines, however, are exempla of human, not…
Cowen, Janet M.
Notes and Queries 226 (1981): 392-93.
British Libreary NMS Additional 12524 was owned successively by Samuel Smith, Ralph Thoresby, and Horace Walpole. British Library MS Additional 9832, owned by Morell Thurston and them by Joseph Haselwood, was used by Urry for his edition. Both…
Cowgill, Bruce Kent.
Susanna Freer Fein, David Raybin, and Peter C. Braeger, eds. Rebels and Rivals: The Contestive Spirit in The Canterbury Tales. Studies in Medieval Culture, no. 29 (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications, 1991), pp. 59-71.
Unlike the homogeneous portrayal of the two clerks in its two closest analogues--De Gombert et les II clercs and Le Meunier et les II clercs--RvT not only differentiates Aleyn from John but also suggests that John dominates their relationship,…
Cowgill, Bruce Kent.
Philological Quarterly 54 (1975): 670-79.
The tournament described in Part IV is archaic. Chaucer's purpose is to dissociate the Knight from the ideals of his age and thus align the tale with its narrator's portrait in the GP as an implicit reproval of the Hundred Years' War.
Cowgill, Bruce Kent.
Journal of English and Germanic Philology 74 (1975): 315-35.
Chaucer's unifying theme in PF is political rather than otherworldly. It involves the contrast between an orderly world governed by natural law (the gate's first inscription and Scipio's "commune profit") and a chaotic world controlled by selfish…
Cowgill, Bruce Kent.
Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 15 (1985): 157-81.
With comic irony Chaucer contrasts Harry Bailly with the Monk and with Dante's Virgil. The Host is a failed spiritual guide and a burlesque Christ-mass priest.
Cowgill, Bruce Kent.
Mediaevalia 8 (1985 for 1982): 151-69.
Mel, MkT, and NPT are related by their concern with spiritual perception or its lack: Mel deals with the failure to listen to Prudence and the return of Sophia; MkT shows "the consequence of sacrificing both prudence and sapientia"; NPT reasserts the…
Reads PF in light of its sources as an allegory of aristocratic responsibility for maintaining natural law and a just society; KnT as an exploration of lawlessness set against the background of Status's "Thebaid," focusing on the tournament; and the…
Cowgill, Jane.
C. David Benson and Elizabeth Robertson, eds. Chaucer's Religious Tales (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1990). pp. 171-83.
Like MLT, SNT, ClT, and WBT, Mel employs a feminine style of persuasion. Prudence "demonstrates" the values she counsels her husband to abide by, thus adding actions to arguments as means of persuasion and subverting the male hierarchy. ParsT, by…
Cowgill, Jane.
Essays in Medieval Studies 12 (1995): 39-53.
As in late-medieval lyrics and drama, the suffering of mothers and children in Chaucer's works is presented as analogous to the suffering of Mary and Jesus. Surveys the presence and absence of references to children in Chaucer's works.
Cowgill, Kent.
Rochester, Minn.: Lone Oak Press, 1995.
A comic novel that derives its characters from GP and most of its sub-plots from CT, cast as the thirty-year reunion of a hapless college baseball team, the Tabelard Bees, with first-person narration by the team's utility player, Jeffrey Shoemaker,…
Cox, Catherine (S.)
Laura C. Lambdin and Robert T. Lambdin, eds. Chaucer's Pilgrims: An Historical Guide to the Pilgrims in the "Canterbury Tales" (Westport, Conn.; and London: Greenwood, 1996), pp. 55-68.
Describes the medieval ecclesiastical hierarchy and places Chaucer's Nun's Priest in the hierarchy, identifying the training and responsibilities of medieval priests and the particular activities of priests who ministered to cloistered nuns and…
Although the Wife of Bath is a character constructed from masculine discourse, she appropriates that discourse into her own autoerotic sexual/textual glossing. In WBP, the Wife reveals an ambivalent feminine poetics within an apparently masculine…
Cox, Catherine S.
South Atlantic Review 61 (1996): 1-21.
As a character "capable of saying one thing but meaning quite another," the Manciple ridicules the "wisdom of the mother" at the end of ManT. The crow suffers for the "feminine behavior" of talking too much, and the Manciple talks "as if a woman" to…
Cox, Catherine S.
Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1997.
A study of "the interconnectedness of gender, epistemology, and poetics in Chaucer's texts," focusing on "idioms of gender that attend narrative protocols of reflexitivity and appropriation." Examines the linguistic, discursive, and sexual…
The discourse of PardPT "disrupts binary structures and exposes the fallacy of essentialist ideologies"; it "interrogates the literary and social consequences of identity categories" assumed in "christological exegesis." The Pardoner's relics recall…
Cox, Catherine S.
Gainesville : University Press of Florida, 2005.
Four chapters and an epilogue. Chapter 1 establishes the background for exploration of "the late medieval legacy of early Christianity's appropriation of the Hebrew scriptures." Chapters 2-3 assess Dante's "Commedia" and "Sir Gawain and the Green…
Cox, Catherine S.
In Nicole Nyffenegger and Katrin Rupp, eds. Writing on Skin in the Age of Chaucer (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2918), pp. 97-118.
Reasons that just as a parchment leaf bears traces of its animal origins and can bear evidence of writing and rewriting, Chaucer writes the Summoner, the Cook, and the Wife of Bath with attention to their skins and the ways in which they communicate…
