Browse Items (16376 total)

Examines the use and misuse of W. W. Greg's term "copy-text" in recent editions of Chaucer and in the Kane-Donaldson Piers Plowman. Confusions among "copy-text," "base text," and "best text" will be alleviated only when editors use the terms…

Line 3164 of NPT includes a pun, for "confusio" is also a technical term referring to the meaning of words. The joke: an apparent mistranslation is not one.

Proposing to assess "how our language of parody...acts to manipulate the literature it is intended to describe," Dane explores the relation of genre to politics. Part 4, "The Classification of Medieval Parody," contains a chapter, "The…

Considerations of the Prioress as a romance heroine have no basis in Chaucer's text; rather they are fantasies of twentieth-century Chaucerians.

Examining past editions of Chaucer--Urry's 1721 edition (commonly considered the "worst" edition), Tyrwhitt's 1775 five-volume edition (the first "modern" edition), and Thomas Morell's 1727 "open" edition--illuminates current editorial practices. …

Now a mainstay of Chaucerian criticism, the term "irony" has designated at least three different concepts in literary history, variously emphasizing the authority of the text, the poet, and the critic. Rhetorical irony, the "appeal to an absent…

A double reception was given Th in the eighteenth century. Dane agrees with Warton that Th is not a "grave heroic narrative" but a humorous tale. The burlesque Th is an eighteenth-century creation. Treats genre of Th and SqT and twentieth-century…

Three motifs in PardT have antecedents in Virgil's "Eclogue" 10, where basket weaving is a metaphor for making poetry. Rejecting physical labor, the Pardoner asserts "otium," associated with begging. In genre, PardT is a begging poem.

In having the Eagle retell the story of Phaethon from Ovid and from medieval interpretations of Ovid, Chaucer oversimplifies and creates conflicts or deficiencies of meaning; this allusive and contradictory treatment of literary tradition in HF…

Just as the theme of memory pervades HF, so Chaucer's recounting of the "Aeneid" in book 1 begins with both detail and accuracy and ends in hasty paraphrase. Chaucer's lines 143-48 translate the opening sentence of the "Aeneid" accurately, save for…

Chaucer achieves maximum concentration on the moment of denouement by organizing his characters into two parallel and static triadic sets. When the characters are in their triadic configurations, no action takes place. The resolution of tension by…

Reviews John H. Fisher's "The Importance of Chaucer" (Studies in the Age of Chaucer 16 (1994), no. 35); Elaine Tuttle Hansen's "Chaucer and the FIctions of Gender" (Studies in the Age of Chaucer 16 (1994), no. 90); and the "Cluster on Chaucer" in…

Questions long-established assumptions about the status of Cambridge Gg and examines Kane's methods for solving Gg 126-38. Argues that the G text of LGWP is "a modern and potentially misleading critical fiction"; that Gg should be regarded as a…

Collates versions of the epitaph on Chaucer's tomb to challenge assumptions underlying the Chaucer-Variorum choice of the Hengwrt manuscript as a base text. While Hengwrt may be close to Chaucer's original, the "movement" from Skeat to Hengwrt in…

Discusses variants in editorial and antiquarian reports of the Latin inscription engraved on Chaucer's tomb and the verses "about the ledge" of the tomb. Suggests that the "snowy tablet" supposedly fixed by Surigone to a pillar near the tomb on…

Chaucer's phrase is traditionally interpreted, "Yet for all the oxen in my plough, I would not take upon me more than enough (i.e., be overly suspicious)." A more accurate reading, however, is "I would not take upon me more than the oxen in my…

Dane argues on the basis of two copies of Thynne's edition that one cannot properly speak of them as "corrected" or "uncorrected."

Larry Benson's understanding of "queynte" as an adjective (SAC 9 [1987], no. 54) is untenable since it depends on a rhyme pattern inadmissible in Chaucer. The true meaning is the traditional one of "pudendum."

Assesses Francis Thynne's references to the "Plowman's Tale" and the "Pilgrim's Tale" in the "Animadversions" on Speght's edition of Chaucer, concluding that no sixteenth-century printer tried to pass off the latter as Chaucer's. Although the…

Eleven studies on the publishing history of Chaucer's works attempt to correct misconceptions about the nature of book production, extant editions and issues of Chaucer's works, and the reliability of bibliographical descriptions.

Suggests that Henry Bradshaw looked at CT as an early book in terms of quire structure, which he tried to reconstruct, rather than a topologically real pilgrimage.

Argues that the printer's copy for most of Thomas Speght's 1602 edition of Chaucer's works was not only a copy of the 1561 edition but "the same copy as was previously marked up to serve as printer's copy for the 1598 edition."

Examines three copies of William Thynne's 1542 edition of Chaucer's Workes and their provenances, arguing that their differences are minimal, likely the result of booksellers' efforts to increase the works' value. The title pages are late…

Although modern readers read SqT as parody, such a reading would have seemed "preposterous" to pre-eighteenth-century readers, who were concerned with sententiae. Pairing tales, pouring over large sections of text, and engaging in self-reflections…

Wide-ranging discussion of the opposition between evidence (physical materials) and discourse (abstractions covered by the word "text") in bibliographical and literary study, with sustained attention to editions of Chaucer and their methods and…