Browse Items (16472 total)

Chaucer's favorite Latin author was Ovid, followed by Virgil and Statius, as well as several prose writers. The central problem in evaluating the Latin influence on Chaucer is to determine what sorts of manuscripts he used--not just texts,but…

Chaucer made at least two authenticated journeys to Italy whereby he gained a knowledge of the works of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. Curiously, though he borrowed extensive narrative material from Boccaccio, Chaucer never mentions him by name as…

In Henryson's poem, contrary to traditional interpretation, Troilus is the more limited character and Cresseid the more noble.

The poets' adaptations of Chaucer's work in this era reflect the nature and principles of Chaucerian transformation for the eighteenth century. In his "Fables" Dryden emphasized the moral nature of the original poems and thus established a tradition…

The discovery of Dryden's indebtedness to Chaucer (TC, V, 817: "That Paradis stood formed in hire yen") for a line in "Absalom" ("And 'Paradise' was open'd in his face") is attributed in the California edition of Dryden's works to an article…

Like most of the early nineteenth-century critics, Leigh Hunt strove to bring about a popular revival of Chaucer. But more important, he was among the first to attempt a technical analysis of Chaucer's poetry and to link his poetry with the idea of…

Two sets of Chaucer illustrations altered the late eighteenth-century and early Romantic readers' perception of Chaucer: George Vertue's for Urry's edition (1721), and Thomas Stothard's for Bell (1782-83). Stothard's illustrations were later…

Blake's portraits of the Pardoner and Summoner in "Chaucer's Canterbury Pilgrims" bear strong resemblances to contemporary satirical portraits of William Pitt the Younger and Charles James Fox, respectively. The descriptions of the two pilgrims in…

English fifteenth-century court verse, comprising formal lyrics and Chaucerian apocrypha, has been neglected because it is not major, not easily accessible, and lacks appropriate criticism. Bases for a critical rationale include awareness of its…

Schowerling investigates the influence of Chaucer's TC on four writers of the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries. Writers and works discussed include Henryson's "Testament of Cresseid," Sidnam's paraphrase of TC, Shakespeare's "Troilus and…

The rhyme royal stanza takes its name from the fact that it was used in ballade contests in the fourteenth century to address real or imaginary royalty. Chaucer employed the stanza first for royal address in PF and TC. In MLT he used it to create a…

John Barbour in "The Bruce" (1375) depicts Sir James Douglas as conforming to the knightly ideal in character and manner,but not in physical appearance. In Chaucer's TC, Criseyde occasionally departs from the pattern of idealized heroine. Through…

Emphasis has shifted from the study of Chaucer as a realist and proto-novelist to the examination of his mode of presentation and his esthetics: principles of rhetoric, uses of style, and poetic theory.

Like his French predecessors, Chaucer employs a commonplace detail and dialogue to impart to his fabliaux a sense of domestic, small town, and rural life. However, while unity in design and treatment characterize the French fabliaux, Chaucer's are…

The author investigates some of the ways in which Chaucer exploited the scheme of CT to enlighten us about the nature of the art of narrative, and demonstrates some of the modern senses in which the poet dramatized the medieval pilgrims with…

The signs of unfinishedness which appear most prominently in Chaucer's unfinished pieces are also present in the more finished pieces, where they make a major contribution to Chaucer's meaning. Chaucer's unfinishedness is due in part to the uses he…

Gower's "Confessio" and Chaucer's CT reflect a process of mediation in which problematic social realities are restated or reconceived. The two writers treat two medieval aesthetics, unity-in-diversity and hierarchies, though Chaucer encourages…

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…