Crane, Susan.
Barbara A. Hanawalt, ed. Chaucer's England: Literature in Historical Context (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), pp. 201-21.
Asserts the importance of assaults on written documents in the so-called Peasants' Revolt of 1381, exploring the hegemony that writing represented to the rebels. Assesses how Langland's revisions of Piers Plowman reflect his concerns with the…
The analogies between the Franklin and Dorigen allow Chaucer to relate class to gender and to explore the ways romance imagines the possibilities and the constraints of self-definition.
Crane, Susan.
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 12 (1990): 47-63.
While critics have recently emphasized classicizing influences, KnT's portrayal of courtship, its enigmatic heroine's resistance to courtship, and the marvels in Diana's temple should be understood in light of romance conventions. Chaucer's…
Crane, Susan.
English Language Notes 25:3 (1988): 10-15.
No case can be made that the Wife of Bath murdered her fourth husband. Such claims are made only by readers who invent for her an extratextual history and psychology or who believe that she "merely fulfills antifeminist expectations rather than…
Galled by clerical antifeminism (woman is weak and hence evil), the power-obsessed Alison turns for her tale to courtly romance (woman is weak and hence good). Thus, ultimately she subverts the conventions of estates, gender, and genre, proving…
Crane, Susan.
Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1986.
Argues that romances produced in England, whether in Anglo-Norman or Middle English, share a consistent series of concerns that distinguishes them from French romances.
Despite traditional misconceptions of their relative chronology and a lack of specific verbal echoes, the "structural and thematic parallels" of BD and Froissart's "Dit dou Bleu Chevalier" indicate Chaucer's dependence on Froissart. Their common…
Crane, Susan.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994.
Romance is the medieval genre that most clearly dramatizes gendered identity, focusing on "courtship, marriage, lineal concerns, primogeniture, and sexual maturation." Chaucer's KnT, WBT, SqT, FranT, and Th reflect and confront masculine identity…
Crane, Susan.
New Medieval Literatures 2 (1998): 159-79.
Suggests that "maying" shapes participants' sexuality, thereby furthering the "ritual's enactment of social status." Uses LGW as an example of the mirroring of human qualities in the natural world.
Crane, Susan.
Robert Boenig and Kathleen Davis, eds. Manuscript, Narrative, Lexicon: Essays on Literary and Cultural Transmission in Honor of Whitney F. Bolton (Lewisburg, Penn: Bucknell University Press; and London: Associated University Presses, 2000), pp. 17-44.
Argues that scribe John Duxworth, rather than his patron Jean d'Angoulême, was the guiding intelligence behind the execution of the Paris manuscript of CT (Ps) and that his revisions and errors are consistent with the habits of other scribes who…
Crane, Susan.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002.
Crane investigates a wide range of cultural rituals, demonstrating how identity was performed in late medieval England and how such performances make meaning and establish identity. She explores the Chaucer coat of arms as self-representation rooted…
The two portions of SqT align the cultural differences between the Mamluk emissary and the Mongol court with the species differences between the falcon and Canacee. Capitalizing on symbolic, metonymic connections between animals and humans and…
References to animals presented as "sentient beings" in SumT convey the friar's "spiritual weakness," perhaps reflecting oral traditions of Franciscan ideals.
Crane, Susan.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013.
Deconstructs the human/animal binary once useful in the emerging field of animal studies by casting anew these relationships into a "multiplicity of intersecting and competing distinctions that better reflect medieval ways of thinking." Through close…
Explores the medieval concept of "mounted knighthood" in "conception and practice," considering how it resonates with "postmodern models of the cyborg, distributed consciousness and the inherently prosthetic self." Assesses "chivalry's intersections…
Argues that two of Chaucer's emphases in SqT modify source material from Boethius's "Consolation of Philosophy" and thereby undo the "binary divide between humankind and animal kinds." The "falcon's species vacillation" and Canace's "cross-species…
Crane, Susan.
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 39 (2017): 3-29.
Argues that PF offers an "innovative model of species uncertainty" that aligns with posthumanist rejection of human specialness. The poem evokes and challenges the dualism of Scipio's dream, offering alternatives in the animism of the tree catalogue…
Crane, Susan.
Marion Turner, ed. A Handbook of Middle English Studies (Chichester: Wiley, 2013), pp. 123-34.
Describes "critical animal studies"; then examines human-animal relations in PrT and NPT, arguing that the Prioress's "selective sympathy for certain animals" in her GP description "forecasts her narrow sympathy for certain humans" in her Tale. NPT,…
Craun, Edwin C.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Discusses how the late medieval Church encouraged and participated in "fraternal corrections," and establishes connections with major English reformist writings, including "The Book of Margery Kempe" and "Piers Plowman." Brief mention of Chaucer's…
Craun, Edwin D.
Cambridge: Cambridge Univeristy Press, 1997.
Draws from thirteenth-century pastoral literature (much of it in manuscript) that treats "Sins of the Tongue" to demonstrate how a pastoral "speech code" was "woven into late medieval [literary] texts." Chapters 1 and 2 distinguish in the pastoral…
Craun, Edwin D.
Edwin D. Craun, ed. The Hands of the Tongue: Essays on Deviant Speech (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications, 2007), pp. 33-60.
Reads the Wife's comments on her constellation (WBP 3.609-23) in light of late medieval pastoral commentary on astral determinism as an excuse for sin. The Wife mocks male-authored confessional speech but embraces male-authored astrological discourse…
Craun, Edwin.
Amy N. Vines and Lee Templeton, eds. New Directions in Medieval Mystical and Devotional Literature: Essays in Honor of Denise N. Baker (Bethlehem, Pa.: Lehigh University Press, 2023), pp. 55-72.
Shows that aspects of the late medieval "pastoral program" of obligating "all Christians to admonish their neighbors about their sins" underlies the Reeve's reproval of the Miller and the Canon's Yeoman's of the Canon. In these cases, distortions of…
Crawford, Donna
Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Teaching 20. 1 (2013): 47-60.
Considers issues of color symbolism, the history of the concept of "race," and ongoing "white normativity" in describing an approach to teaching FranT to African-American students at an historically black college or university (HBCU).
