Interprets the GP description of the Prioress as a satire of an institution rather than a critique of an individual, offering the reading as a prolegomenon to a comparative discussion of the challenges of teaching English and teaching foreign…
Radulescu, Raluca L.
Claire McIlroy and Anne M. Scott, Literature, Emotions, and Pre-Modern War: Conflict in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Leeds: Arc Humanities, 2021), pp. 45-63.
Investigates the restless "emotional movement" of "roaming" in KnT, as expression of both confined frustration and openness to new adventures enacted by Palamon, Emelye, and Arcite. Compares Chaucer's depictions of these movements and emotions with…
Alamichel, Marie-Françoise.
Claire Vial, ed. 'Gode is the lay, swete is the note': Résonances dans les lais bretons moyen-anglais / Echoes in the Middle English Breton Lays (2014): n.p. (web publication).
Addresses landscape descriptions in Middle English Breton lays. Focuses on two literary categories of landscapes: romance and magical settings.
Blandeau, Agnés.
Claire Vial, ed. 'Gode is the lay, swete is the note': Résonances dans les lais bretons moyen-anglais / Echoes in the Middle English Breton Lays (2014): n.p. (web publication).
Assesses the theme of keeping one's word in Breton lays, including FranT, focusing on the theme's Middle Ages: pledging and keeping one's word, and its opposite, breaking one's promise or betraying one's pledge.
Carruthers, Leo.
Claire Vial, ed. 'Gode is the lay, swete is the note': Résonances dans les lais bretons moyen-anglais / Echoes in the Middle English Breton Lays (2014): n.p. (web publication).
Explores the semantic and cultural fields underlying the terms 'Breton' and 'Celtic'. Posits that Chaucer willingly betrays his knowledge of the traditional geography and culture connected with Breton lays in FranT.
Moulin, Joanny.
Claire Vial, ed. 'Gode is the lay, swete is the note': Résonances dans les lais bretons moyen-anglais / Echoes in the Middle English Breton Lays (2014): n.p. (web publication).
Discusses theoretical approaches to the study of Breton lays, including gender and postcolonial studies. Includes brief references to FranT.
Scala, Elizabeth.
Claire Vial, ed. 'Gode is the lay, swete is the note': Résonances dans les lais bretons moyen-anglais / Echoes in the Middle English Breton Lays (2014): n.p. (web publication).
Argues that Chaucer's interest in Breton lays rests on the genre's association with magic and language. WBT has features of a Breton lay, but is not marked as such; FranT, even though it has its sources in the Italian novelle, is marked as a Breton…
Séguy, Mireille.
Claire Vial, ed. 'Gode is the lay, swete is the note': Résonances dans les lais bretons moyen-anglais / Echoes in the Middle English Breton Lays (2014): n.p. (web publication).
Compares FranT with Breton lays, and centers on how memory, and the unreliability of the past, weaken the connection between Middle English lays and Breton lays.
Stévanovitch, Colette.
Claire Vial, ed. 'Gode is the lay, swete is the note': Résonances dans les lais bretons moyen-anglais / Echoes in the Middle English Breton Lays (2014): n.p. (web publication).
Concentrates on rhythm in FranT and contends that FranT is successful as a poetic composition, but cannot claim to be a Breton lay.
Yvernault, Martine.
Claire Vial, ed. 'Gode is the lay, swete is the note': Résonances dans les lais bretons moyen-anglais / Echoes in the Middle English Breton Lays (2014): n.p. (web publication).
Although courtly love, magic, and supernatural situations make up the framework of FranT, the role played by binding agreements, contracts, and consent in the Tale alters the traditional definition of magic. Claims that fourteenth-century society was…
Laskaya, Anne.
Claire Vial, ed. 'Gode is the lay, swete is the note': Résonances dans les lais bretons moyen-anglais / Echoes in the Middle English Breton Lays (2014): n.p. (web publication).
Includes the argument that the material context of FranT must be considered as a relevant framework for reading Middle English Breton lays.
Archibald, Elizabeth.
Claire Vial, ed. 'Gode is the lay, swete is the note': Résonances dans les lais bretons moyen-anglais / Echoes in the Middle English Breton Lays (Etudes Epistémè, no. 25, 2014): n.p. (web publication).
Despite the widely accepted claim that French and Middle English Breton lays are concerned primarily with love, argues that the English poems pay relatively little attention to romantic love, and are more concerned with identity, family separation…
Douglas, Blaise.
Claire Vial, ed. "A noble tale / Among us shall awake": Approches croisees des "Middle English Breton Lays" et du "Franklin's Tale" (Paris: Presses Universitaires de Paris Ouest, 2015), pp. 17-25.
Explores the notion of commitment in connection with the contradictory and untenable verbal pledges in FranT.
Morrison, Stephen.
Claire Vial, ed. "A noble tale / Among us shall awake": Approches croisees des "Middle English Breton Lays" et du "Franklin's Tale" (Paris: Presses Universitaires de Paris Ouest, 2015), pp. 27-34.
Focuses on how playfulness breaks the limits of existential constraint in FranT.
Ruszkiewicz, D.
Claire Vial, ed. "A noble tale / Among us shall awake": Approches croisees des "Middle English Breton Lays" et du "Franklin's Tale" (Paris: Presses Universitaires de Paris Ouest, 2015), pp. 35-44.
Studies shifting perspectives on love, marriage, and honor in FranT and WBT.
Kinney, Clare Regan.
Clare Regan Kinney, Strategies of Poetic Narrative (Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 31-68.
Considers TC as a narrative poem in relation to Boccaccio's Filostrato, exploring three narrative "designs" highlighted by the comparison: additive, goal-resistent dilation; patterned, goal-determining organization; and revisionary interpretation in…
Hoffman, Richard L.
Classica et Mediaevalia 25 (1964): 263-72.
Surveys arguments that seek to identify sources and analogues to the claim in KnT 1.1625-26 that neither love nor lordship "likes competition with another of its kind," citing similarities with TC 2.755-56, FranT 5.764-67, and others, and arguing…
Grennen, Joseph E.
Classica et Mediaevalia 26 (1965): 306-33.
Shows that "clichés of thought and expression" abound in medieval alchemical treatises, and explains how Chaucer's uses of these "topoi" or commonplaces "contribute to the meaning" of CYPT. Tabulates commonplaces of alchemical behavior, preparation,…
Hoffman, Richard L.
Classica et Mediaevalia 30 (1969): 552-77.
Defends Mel as a meaningful allegory, considering in turn Chaucer's use of the name "Sophia," his reference to wounded feet, and the "extended account" of Christ's passion which indicate framing attention to the Crucifixion. Then tabulates "three…
Dane, Joseph A.
Classical and Modern Literature 1 (1980): 57-75.
Argues that HF is organized and coherent: it is consistently concerned with poetic art, its tripartite structure is based on the "rhetorical doctrine of three styles," and the styles correlate with the "three principal works" of Virgil"…
Ruff, Nancy K.
Classical and Modern Literature 12 (1991): 59-68.
Chaucer's ironic treatment of the Dido legend in LGW and HF involves a naive narrator who erroneously sympathizes with Dido; a medieval audience would have recognized differences from the treatment of Dido in Virgil's Aeneid and Ovid's Heroides. …
Edgecombe, Rodney Stenning.
Classical and Modern Literature 20.2: 61-65, 2000.
Lucretius's "De rerum natura" may have influenced the reverdie, or spring song, that opens GP. Lucretius's reverdie predates and almost certainly influenced those in the "Georgics" and the "Pervigilius veneris," already linked to The General…
Vermeule, Blakey
Classical and Modern Literature 22.2: 85-101, 2002
Describes the cognitive condition of "mind blindness," often associated with autism, and argues that a literary version of the condition recurs in satire, where authors use the blind spots of characters to ironically convey unstated information. Uses…
Rudat, Wolfgang E. H.
Classical and Modern Literature 3.2 (1983): 89-98.
Explores the allusion to Virgil's "Georgics" in "Faerie Queene" 1.1.50-53, arguing that Spenser "desexualizes the Vergilian model by removing [its] generative principle" (90) and thereby re-makes the Classical/Christian topos that underlies Chaucer's…
McVeigh, Terrence A.
Classical Folia 29 (1975): 54-58.
Tradition relates the sin of simony to leprosy and sodomy, as evidenced by John Wyclif's "Tractatus De Simonia." The physical abnormalities of the Pardoner and Summoner in CT can thus be seen as symbolic of their simony.
