Browse Items (16472 total)

The essay describes the "complex exercises in historical reconstruction" essential to bridge the distance between modern readers and Chaucer and his contemporary audience. Discusses Chaucer's literary production, his revisions, and scribal…

Yeager summarizes Chaucer's education and career for the purpose of identifying the books, languages, and classical and vernacular literatures with which Chaucer was clearly acquainted. Discusses Chaucer's strategies for keeping literary authority at…

Kruger summarizes medieval dream theory and argues that Chaucer exploits "the complexities, ambiguities, and uncertainties of dreams, their causes, and their interpretation." Dreams pose interpretive problems in NPT and TC. As dream visions, BD, HF,…

Windeatt examines how the court and elements of courtly writing are represented and function in BD, HF, PF, and LGWP, with some attention to SqT. Comments on Machaut as Chaucer's model and how the dream vision gives Chaucer the liberty to examine…

Chaucer indicates that same-sex friendship is threatened when complicated by issues of "sexual love" (127). Considering TC, PF, WBPT, and FranT, Brewer calls for reinstatement of friendship "as a recognizable, uncontentious area of love" and praises…

In TC, Chaucer avoids focusing on war, revealing his awareness of its importance in perpetrating the aristocratic culture of his day, as well as his need to evade the expectations imposed on him as a writer. Conflict and the psychological disjunction…

Wing explores similarities and differences among the characterizations of Emelye in Boccaccio's Teseida, KnT, Anne de Graville's Le beau romant, and The Two Noble Kinsmen. The characterizations differ, but only in Shakespeare and Fletcher's play is…

Describes the background to and representations of the harmony of the spheres in PF and in HF, arguing that both poems depict the "three ventricles of the brain"--imagination, logic, and memory--and that, through parody and/or inversion, each depicts…

Describes and compares Chaucer's use of adverbs ending in -e, formed from adjectives, and those ending in -ly/-lice.

Characterizes the Franklin in light of his social status, administrative and judicial offices, his "Epicurean concern for externals," and his association with the Sergeant at Law. Then reads FranT as an ironic indictment of the narrator's foolish…

The Man of Law in his Prologue, in his characterization of Custance, and in his concept of Christ's "prudent purveiaunce" consistently revises his sources, especially Nicholas Trevet, into the materialistic terms of the world governed by Fortune. …

Argues that the Merchant's attitudes are reflected in the views of Justinus (not January) in MerT.

Argues that CT reflects "astrological schema" and traces the evidence of a single cycle of the twelve signs in GP (Aries and Taurus), KnT (Gemini), MilT (Cancer), RvT (Leo), CkT (Virgo), MLT (Libra), WBPT (Scorpio), FrT (Sagittarius), SumT…

Coins the phrase "liminal transactionalism" to characterize the late medieval combination of gift-exchange and commercial economies, arguing that a similar combination extends forward to Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations," challenging traditional…

Explores "links between gender ideology and money in the late Middle Ages," arguing that Chaucer's "depiction of his purse as a faithless female lover" in Purse reflects the "cultural imaginary around money before the emergence of
political…

Examines relations between theology and economics in FrPT and SumPT (with glances at WBP and PardPT), focusing on the polysemous implications of debt, and suggesting that these tales are "key source texts" for modern "economic theology" (Weber to…

Considers relations between PardPT and the Museum of London's carved wooden panel that depicts details of the tale. Calculates the "absurdity of the hoard" in the tale, and explores possible responses of the "London economic elite" to the differing…

Examines the "unresolved ending" of the "Legend of Philomela" in LGW.

Considers the hermeneutic value of Spearing's concept of "experientiality" in KnT. Defines "roaming" as "an investigation of the relation between bodily experience and language."

Argues that CT and Gower's "Confessio Amantis" take the form of French "dit" poems. Claims that both works fit the genre because they have "sufficient 'dit'-like features."

Proposes to resituate Pity within a "medieval mode of metaphysical poetry" because of its "collective subjectivity." Reveals how Pity, because of its allegorical and lyrical metaphysical aspects, deserves closer attention as an "example of medieval…

Examines the lexicographical meaning of the word "experience" to gain an understanding of Chaucer's meaning and intent in WBP.

Explores ways that Chaucer plays with the "work of makyng" in Adam and Pr–ThL. Reinforces that Chaucer's "middleness," or ability to remain in the "process of making," is revealed in these rhyme royal works.

Reexamines own earlier writings about Troilus's metaphysical "philosophizing response" and journey in TC, in response to a critique from Spearing from March 25, 1989.

Reviews canon, allusion, and literary influence in English literature. Refers to Chaucer as the head of the English canon, discusses Matthew Arnold's thoughts on Chaucer, and reveals limited attention to Chaucer in the 1909 "Harvard Classics"…