Browse Items (16472 total)

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…

Chaucer and his fellow pilgrims saw Madame Eglentyne as the Virgin's handmaiden, reflecting in her foibles and virtues the Queen of Heaven, whose "amor vincit omnia" (love conquers all). Support for the existence of the Marian echoes includes the…

Recognition of the arming of the warrior "topos" guides us to many formal arming passages: in the Babylonian epic, the "Iliad," The Bible, the "Aeneid," Irish literature, "Beowulf," the "Chanson de Roland," "Erec et Enide," the Arthurian series,…

Most critics agree Th parodies Middle English tail-rhyme romances. A regularity of stress, external rhyme, internal alliterations, stanza pattern, and a "bobbing" meter reflect Chaucer's polished craft. While offering an ample measure of "sentence"…

Chaucer gives large emphasis and exaggerated length to the didactic. Mel and ParsT are so solidly "there" in the structure of CT that we would not understand the dynamics of the poem if we did not take them into account. Chaucer vies with Dante in…

A framework for the function of the medieval world of learning in NPT can be found in the scheme of the Seven Liberal Arts (grammar, rhetoric, dialectic, astrology, arithmetic, geometry, and music). Although arithmetic and geometry are too abstract…

Generically and rhetorically NPT is a fable devoted to the teaching of wisdom, undercut by its mock quality, by its characterization, by its scholastic reasoning; but finally leading us back, on a higher level, to its original didactic purpose. NPT…

By constantly breaking the dramatic illusion, the Nun's Priest forces his audience to consider the implications not only of his storytelling but of storytelling itself. The interruptions of his narrative, the comparisons of chickens and people, the…

The satiric fable, with oral origins among the Orientals and Greeks, is usually characterized by economy, light-heartedness, and singleness of impression. The popularity of the genre continued into the Middle Ages and beyond not only because of its…