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…
Davis, Norman,and Douglas Gray, Patricia Ingham, and Anne Wallace-Hadrill.
Oxford: Clarendon, 1979.
A glossary based largely on the Tatlock and Kennedy "Concordance." It does not go beyond A of Rom, nor does it cover the "Equatorie." Different meanings are cited by line references; etymologies are provided; there is a useful introductory note on…
Davis, Norman.
Geoffrey Chaucer: Conferenze Organizzate dall'Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei in Collaborazione con la British Academy (Rome: Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, 1977), pp. 3-22.
Surveys opinions about Chaucer's diction from John Lydgate to G. K. Chesterton and explores the French elements in the vocabulary of his love poetry, along the way commenting on relations between Chaucerian and Chancery diction, the "texture of…
Davis, Norman.
Review of English Studies 20 (1969): 43-50.
Describes the contents of a page in Nottingham University Library, MS ME LM 1, that includes a "genuine witness" to Gent and several English and Latin proverbs,; also shows that the version of Gent in Cambridge University Library Gg. 4.27.1b "has no…
Davis, Norman.
Leeds Studies in English 1 (1967): 7-17.
Demonstrates the "conventional and unspontaneous elements in the language" of early English letter-writing, citing examples from the Paston letters, Cely letters, Stonor letters, etc., and discussing how phrasing reflects earlier literary usage,…
Davis, Norman.
Review of English Studies 16, no. 63 (1965): 233-44.
Considers Chaucer's modifications in Troilus's letter (TC 5.1317-1421) of Boccaccio's original in "Filostrato" and of Beauvau's French translation in "Roman de Troyle et de Criseida," arguing that the changes reflect late-medieval English…
Davis, P. J., ed.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020.
The introduction to this edition of Valerius includes a section on "The Later Middle Ages: Benoit, Guido, Chaucer, and Boccaccio," discussing whether or not "medieval writers were familiar with Valerius Flaccus." Demonstrates that, although Chaucer…
