Davis, Adam Brooke.
Chaucer Review 28 (1993): 54-66.
In TC, as in CT, Chaucer plays with genre, first postulating it and then blurring the reader's expectations of what it will do. Readers are forced to question the value of "Art as an interpreter of Life."
Explores multiple meanings of "game"--as transgression, violent activity, pleasure, source of food--in "Gamelyn " (which takes the place of CkT in several texts of CT). Identifies idea of boundaries (legal and social) and punning on the name of…
Davis, Alex.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020.
Explores ho inheritance was imagined between the lifetimes of Chaucer and Shakespeare. Examines medieval writings, including CT and TC, and Renaissance writings, such as Edmund Spenser's "Faerie Queene" and William Shakespeare's "As You Like It,"…
Davis examines ramifications of the interplay between graphic design and text in William Morris's Kelmscott edition of Chaucer, arguing that the consequent mediation is a precursor to Walter Benjamin's theorized divorce of mechanically reproduced art…
Davis, Carmel Brendon.
Estela Valverde, ed. A Universal Argentine: Jorge Luis Borges, English Literature and Other Inquisitions (Sydney: Southern Highlands Press, 2009), pp. 105-14.
Investigates the validity of Jorge Louis Borges' claim (1949) that Chaucer effected or recorded the "definitive shift from allegory to novel" when translating a line from Boccaccio's "Teseida" in his KnT. Davis focuses on the "slipperiness of…
In its concerns with social rank and professional distractions, the marriage of Arveragus and Dorigen in FranT mirrors that of Chaucer and Philippa. The theme of the Tale (that true love cannot be maintained without outside considerations) might…
Identifies a "significant continuity of thought" in BD, HF, and PF: "their shared concern" with Nature and Fortune as principles of order and fertility, on the one hand, and disorder on the other. Traces the roots of these concerns in Boethius, Alain…
Davis, Deborah Ann.
Ph.D. Dissertation. Texas Women's University, 1984. Fully Accessible at https://twu-ir.tdl.org/items/668fcba6-645b-4fcf-a8e3-1ef1c6f4ff36; accessed November 14, 2023.
Argues from internal and external evidence "that there is the strong possibility" that Chaucer's dream visions (BD, HF, PF, and LGWP) influenced five early works by F. Scott Fitzgerald: "The Offshore Pirate" (1920), "The Ice Palace (1920), "The…
Davis, I.
Ph.D. Dissertation. University of York, 2002. Dissertation Abstracts International C67.02 and C70.33. Abstract available via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global; accessed August 24, 2025.
Item not seen. From the abstract: "This thesis investigates a particular discourse which conflated ideas of male sexuality and work . . . in the particular social and economic climate of late fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century London." Discerns…
Davis, Isabel, and Catherine Nall, eds.
Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2015.
Eleven essays and an introduction (by Davis) deal with Chaucer's concern with poetic fame and/or with his poetic reputation among his contemporaries, down to the twenty-first century. The introduction (pp. 1–19) describes the essays and comments on…
Davis, Isabel.
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Davis explores "intersections between medieval masculine subjectivity and the ethics of labour and living" in Langland's "Piers Plowman," Usk's "The Testament of Love," Gower's "Confessio Amantis," the poetry of Hoccleve, and Chaucer's CYPT. Reads…
Davis, Isabel.
Literature Compass 6 (2009): 842-63.
Davis assesses late medieval, first-person narration in English literature as a rhetorical and allegorical device and as an autobiographical stance. She comments on the influence of Augustine and Boethius and explores a range of Middle English…
Explores relations between concepts of selfhood and notions of spiritual and, especially, secular vocation in WBT, Langland's "Piers Plowman," and Gower's "Vox clamantis." The "wide scope" of late medieval applications of the Pauline notion of being…
Davis, Isabel.
Marion Turner, ed. A Handbook of Middle English Studies (Chichester: Wiley, 2013), pp. 285-98.
Explores Middle English nuances of a set of related concepts: class, estate, identity, calling, and "clayme," investigating them in light of Pauline distinctions between use and possession and between old and new, discussed by Giorgio Agamben.…
Davis, Isabel.
Katie L. Walter, ed. Reading Skin in Medieval Literature and Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 99-118.
Considers "the special use that medieval writers made of skin as a metaphor for time," focusing on the "structural patterns" of "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" and WBP--"suspension, cessation, and repetition"--and how these patterns "imitate the…
Davis, Isabel.
Literature Compass 6.4 (2009): 842-63.
Surveys uses of first-person narrative in late medieval English literary texts, agreeing with and extending earlier critics' arguments that find in this literature notions of selfhood often attributed to the early modern period. Observes how and…
Challenges D.W. Robertson's approach to allegory and to the WBP, arguing that the medieval outlook was more flexible than Robertson asserted, more capable of varied attitudes toward present times, the historical past, the eschatological future, and…
Davis, John.
Journal for the History of Astronomy 50, no. 2 (2019): 121–54; 11 color illus.
Offers evidence that the "Chaucerian" astrolabe in the British Museum was constructed in the early fifteenth century, perhaps for Henry Beaufort, bishop of Winchester, and provides "a scenario whereby . . . Chaucer would be exposed to astrolabes with…
Davis, John.
Nuncius: Journal of the Material and Visual History of Science 34 (2019): 27-68; 11 color illus.
Describes in detail an astrolabe--Tiroler Landesmuseum Ferdinandeum/Zeughaus, Innsbruck, inv. no. 2957, U215--and relates it to other fourteenth-and fifteenth-century English astrolabes labeled "Chaucerian" because their "strapwork" is similar to…
Focuses on critical commentary on Chaucer by William Godwin, William Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt, and Walter Savage Landor, concluding with a survey of efforts by Romantic writers to claim that Chaucer shared their outlooks.
Davis, Kathleen.
Kathleen Coyne Kelly and Tison Pugh, eds. Chaucer on Screen: Absence, Presence, and Adapting the "Canterbury Tales" (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2016), pp. 239-48.
Views the BBC television version of MLT as an exploration of the simultaneities of past, present, and future, interrelated with motifs of amnesia, immigration, political struggle, religious warfare, and the "correlation of spiritual and sexual…
Davis, Kathleen.
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, ed. The Postcolonial Middle Ages (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000), pp. 105-22.
Contemporary orientalism is based on a paradoxical notion of the Middle Ages as both the precursor of modernity and an unchanging alterity. Davis identifies this paradox in Edward Said's "Orientalism" and Diane Sawyer's television documentary,…
Davis, Kathleen.
Kathy Lavezzo, ed. Imagining a Medieval English Nation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), pp. 161-90.
Parallels between the sex/gender system and establishing medieval English identity indicate that the perceived doubleness of woman echoes that of the nation. PF does not fantasize about a unified nation, but it does produce "England" as a site of…
Ten essays by various authors on topics related to digital research and analysis in medieval studies, with an Introduction by the editors and a comprehensive index. For two essays that pertain to Chaucer, search for Meeting the Medieval in a Digital…
Examines a diverse range of authors from the fourteenth to the early eighteenth centuries for their political, philosophical, and scientific perspectives in order to map a movement away from a trust in collective experience and toward a focus on the…
