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William Blake avoided the normal publisher-author relationship. "To know the publishing options taken (and refused) by Chaucer...enables the critic to explain the often less visible, but more fundamental, social engagements which meet in and…

In response to Morton Bloomfield, "Contemporary Literary Theory and Chaucer," Minnis distinguishes between the "alterity" and the "modernity" of medieval literature, arguing that medieval theories of literature should be applied to Chaucer.

The academic prologue, which introduced commentaries on "auctores," developed an Aristotelian form in the thirteenth century. Chaucer did not employ any of the traditional prologue paradigms, but many of his literary attitudes seem to have been…

(Presidential address to the New Chaucer Society). Chaucerians must engage undergraduate minds, going beyond source studies, textual studies, and narrow explications into cultural history, sociology, historiography, and ethnography.

For Chaucer poetry and love are closely related: both are creative arts to which the verb "make" is applied. Chaucer uses writing and book imagery to symbolize a creative love act.

Chaucer's references to education are scattered, unpredictable, and peripheral except in the WBT and SqT, where the education theme is central.

A difficult form requiring of the reader a complex consciousness and thus hitherto largely neglected by critics, Menippean satire provides a meaningful context for Chaucer. The works of the third century B.C. satirist, themselves being lost, come to…

Modern readers must resist the limitations of twentieth-century literary-critical approach and interpret Chaucer in the traditional critical context: studies of manuscript tradition, text, and lexical context.

In Chaucer, as in patristic writings, true marriage proceeds from physical to psychological to spiritual union, even emblematizing the relationship of God to church or soul. Analysis of marriage in CT further reveals sexual politics.

Symbolic details in Chaucer may also be thematic, e.g., the five etymologies of Saint Cecilia's name in SNT, and certain features of GP, MerT, FranT, others of the CT, and TC. Words and phrases also are often thematic.

Chaucerians should welcome the new critical techniques, which will help them determine what it is in the words that causes us to respond as we do. The application of these methods will transcend cultural differences that separate us from Chaucer.

Descriptive rather than interpretative approaches are preferred for Chaucer literary studies, according to Bloomfield, but we need to know "how" the poet constructed his work; thus semantics, the philosophy of speech acts, sociology, etc., are…

Concerned with the practical and beneficial impact of his work, Chaucer drew figurative language from everyday sources, e.g., the visual arts. Knowledge of these sheds light on GP, WBT, and RvT.

Classical and medieval theories of allegory profoundly affected the interpretation and creation of medieval allegorical literature. The medieval audience believed that all worthwhile writing represented some truth, not necessarily Augustinian…

Commissioned originally to be read at the Second International Congress of the New Chaucer Society, these thirteen essays demonstrate the validity of recent critical trends in Chaucer. Several essays on historical approaches to Chaucer suggest new…

The Virgilian "Iuppiter descendens" in CT combines the sacred and the profane. Sexual motivation governs the behavior and storytelling of some of the pilgrims. Medieval man was able to integrate the serious with the comical because he possessed a…

Chaucer's lyric mode developed from the conventional toward the original, from everyman-speaker toward individual voice,from vague to concrete, from realist toward nominalist in philosophical outlook.

Chaucer's optimism, humor, and satire as well can be properly appreciated only in the light of his Catholic view of life. Some typical mistakes in translation are also made from lack of enough knowledge of Catholicism: the doctrines, liturgies,…

Modern literary theory is concerned with the problem of "how language 'refers' in the critical text that has lost faith in the communion between language and reality." Shoaf observes this faith, which was stronger in the Middle Ages, at work in the…

Chaucer develops original significances for birds, especially in HF, NPT, and PF. Birds variously represent the bestial in humanity, models for human society, objects of ridicule, and mediators between God and man. All four can be seen in the…

Chaucer considers history as a process of translation. For Chaucer to English the Troy legend is to read his culture into that tragic history.

Modern critical theory demonstrates the radically traditional closed systems of medieval poetry. In his negative examples and examples of abuse and falsification, especially in TC, Chaucer is also aware of what the classical tradition "is not."

Essays by various hands. For five essays that pertain to Chaucer, search for Studies in Chaucer under Alternative Title (using "starts with" option).

Medieval literary theory in general, and commentary on Ovid's "Metamorphoses," the tales-in-a-frame book most certainly important to Chaucer, suggest that CT can best be understood when grouped in four kinds: natural, magical, moral, and spiritual. …

By analysis of manuscript traditions Benson argues that there were at most two early orderings of CT. All later orderings in manuscripts are scribal rearrangements or distortions of these two. Both orders, one of which is the Ellesmere order,…