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Readers resolve conflicts by readjusting genre expectations. NPT is a beast fable "told in the rhetoric of epic. The homely moral of the tale is comically inconsistent with the implications of high seriousness in the language."

Although Chaucer was not a "painterly" poet, he was, like most other serious writers of the time, an iconographic poet. Examines a number of medieval images appropriate to Chaucer's life of Saint Cecilia and includes twenty reproductions in black…

The focus of ManT is not adultery and murder but rather talebearing. Chaucer returns to Ovid for janglery as a serious crime. If janglery causes murder, the janglerer is as guilty as the murderer because he is the cause of the crime.

Five patristic quotations in ParsT have not been noted: one originates in Pseudo-Augustine, a second in Isidore of Seville, another in St. Jerome, and two others can be traced to St. Gregory.

Frequently used in ParsT, colloquial anaphora enhances the homiletic style in such repetitious expressions as "Now Comth...," "Look forther...," "Certes...," and "Soothly,...."

As suggested by the manuscripts, Anel is a complete, finished poem (with the omission of an unchaucerian final stanza). It is concerned with the theme of poetry as an art functioning as a record of history. Its closest affiliations are with the…

Deals with both real ecstatic visions and fictional literary visions and gives criteria to discern them. Thus it provides the background for Chaucer's dream poetry as well, quoting Langland, BD, HF, LGW, PF, etc.

An examination of the source, Machaut's "Jugement dou Roy de Behaingne," proves that the Knight's and the Dreamer's mutual lack of understanding--which serves a powerful dramatic purpose--stems from differences in social background and rank.

Chaucer's audience would not have come to BD with our preconceptions (that the Man is John of Gaunt and that his song is personal). Rather, they would have experienced the gradual revelations as they are unfolded and would have concerned themselves…

In BD Chaucer skillfully breaks with French poetic practice to produce a new kind of poetry. The enigmatic narrator does not participate in established conventions; an insomniac amateur reader, he does not fully understand the matter he presents.

Critics differ in their assessment of the structure and the nature of the consolation in BD. Chaucer uses juxtaposition as his structural principle. The consolation is Boethian, transcending the intensity of human grief, but Chaucer insists upon…

BD's central theme is that change is necessary and inevitable and must be graciously accepted. Initially the Black Knight avoids change; by the end of BD he is reconciled with, and embraces, change. In BD, Chaucer succeeds in his portrayal of…

The narrator's eight-year sickness may refer to the last illness of Henry, Duke of Lancaster. The portrait of Lady White departs significantly from that of Machaut's lady in "Jugement dou Roy de Behaingne" to reconcile courtly with Christian love.

Reconciles Wimsatt's other writings on BD--one emphasizing the closeness of BD to fourteenth-century French love poetry, the other studying the religious significance of the poem in the context of Christian tradition--which produce quite different…

Far from being "entirely tropological" or imaginative, the descriptions of the Temple of Venus and the House of Fame and Rumor accurately reflect the forms and details of contemporary structures. As Clerk of the Works and perhaps an acquaintance of…

HF classifies memory as an aspect of Prudence, as reflected in its three-part structure and reinforced by its thematic meditation on fame. GP portraits develop with details of "artificial" memory, as do the pilgrimage itself and the game. KnT…

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's address to Thought in the Invocation to book 2 stresses the function of memory in his art. Love tidings are words from old books. Books are still the activator of new poems, even though "auctorite" may be enriched by "experimentum." The…

Some characteristics of the legend of Philomene, Phyllis, and Hypermnestra are discussed. The brief conclusion proves that the poet's attitude toward LGW is ambivalent; he seems to be mocking, satirical, and at the same time serious and even…

In LGW, Chaucer suppressed most of the Cleopatra tradition (asps, etc.) to make her a medieval "good woman," who builds a shrine for Anthony and enters a snake pit to dramatize the grave-worm "topos." Alceste transcends the grave--the thematic…

It has been argued that the poem exhibits multiplicity and disharmony, though the poet shows a commitment to traditional forms of culture. There is no such commitment in PF. The multiplicity of authority and the "continuous self-reflexivity" does…

Although Charles d'Orleans first described an actual Valentine's Day lottery, it was apparently Chaucer who, in PF and Mars, first associated Saint Valentine's Day with love, both in its ornithological simplicity and in its human complexity. His…

Essays by various hands. For two essays that pertain to Chaucer, search for Literary and Historical Perspectives of the Middle Ages under Alternative Title.

Distinguishing the process of allegory from the nature of allegoresis, Chaucer deallegorizes his sources. He addresses not a reader but an "auditor," who is not asked to judge his own interpretive procedures. Jean de Meun defends the use of slang…