Chaucer manipulates names in the TC to add nuance to the individual characters and to make clear their subtle relationships. Although "Pandare" is used first, for example, the name "Pandarus" relates to "Troilus" and implies the insinuation of the…
Delahoyde, Michael.
[Pullman]: Washington State University, n.d.
Pedagogical website that focuses on CT but includes internal links to descriptions of Chaucer's other works and to background information. Individual webpages provide descriptions of the Tales that comment on themes and critical issues, accompanied…
Delahoyde, Michael.
Brief Chronicles: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Authorship Studies 5 (2014): 69-100.
Tallies a number of specific "[i]nfluences, echoes, or borrowings from Chaucer in English poetic tradition as it developed between Henry Howard, earl of Surrey, and Shakespeare," mentioning familiar instances and adding ones previously unnoticed.…
Examines the allusion to Constantinus Africanus's "De Coitu" in MerT 4.1810-11, suggesting that knowledge of the treatise helps us to understand that January's consumption of aphrodisiacs is "manically compulsive" and sinful.
Explores the "ambivalent status" of clerks in the Middle Ages and the significance of clerkly success in "quiting" (defeating, taking vengeance on) carpenters and millers in MilT and RvT. In the latter, Chaucer avoids "quiting" the Reeve and thereby…
Delany, Sheila, ed.
New York and London : Routledge, 2002.
Fourteen essays by various authors who study Jews as an absent presence in medieval England, considering fourteenth- and fifteenth-century texts for their literary, historical, theological, and visual representations of Jews. Some essays reprinted.…
Delany, Sheila.
Florilegium 10 (1991, for 1988): 83-92.
Deeply rooted in late-medieval social and religious ambivalence toward women, Chaucer's poetry both subverts and asserts traditional gender differences, as seen in LGWP, FranT, and WBP.
Delany, Sheila.
Straus, Barrie Ruth, ed. Skirting the Texts: Feminisms' Re-Readings of Medieval and Renaissance Texts. Special Issue of Exemplaria 4 (1992): 7-34.
Critics' resistence to sexual wordplay in medieval texts such as Chaucer's TC and CT stems not only from a radical difference between medieval and modern standards of good taste, but also from the critics' desire to repress unsettling textual…
Examines late-fourteenth-century English attitudes toward crusading as background for Chaucer's view of the Orient as a form of the "Other." Evident in LGW, Chaucer's views reflect the prejudices of his age, which regarded Orientals as irredeemable.
Delany, Sheila.
Minnesota Review, New Series 5 (1975): 104-15.
The Wife of Bath turned the sexual economics of her time to her advantage. Margery Kempe could not so capitulate. Religion became her way of asserting ownership of herself.
Delany, Sheila.
A. P. Foulkes, ed. The Uses of Criticism (Bern: H. Lang, 1976), pp. 77-95. Reprinted in R. A. Shoaf, ed. Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde: "Subgit to alle Poesy": Essays in Criticism. MRTS, no. 104 (Binghamton N.Y.: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1994), pp. 29-46.
In TC Chaucer deliberately uses the technique of alienation or aesthetic distancing through devices that render ordinary characters and situations peculiar and unexpected.
A collection of essays previously published, to which Delany has added a new essay, "Run Silent, Run Deep: Heresy and Alchemy as Medieval Versions of Utopia," to examine utopian discourse in the Middle Ages.
Delany, Sheila.
Mediaevalia 13 (1989, for 1987): 275-94.
A twelfth-century "lai" and its fourteenth-century moralization, both in the 'Ovide moralise,' provided Chaucer verbal details and a general concept for his treatment of "Thisbe" in LGW. Echoing the fissure between the 'lai' and the…
Delany, Sheila.
Hebrew University Studies in Literature and the Arts 15 (1987): 27-35.
By omitting details about the Wife's experiences of work and travel, Chaucer deliberately reduces her complexity. His failure to express her social or psychological reality results from his own experience and desires mediated by gender, social…
Chaucer's line "Betynge with his heles on the grounde" (LGW 863) echoes Geoffrey's description of Frollo's death ("Historia regum Britanniae" 9.9) and in turn suggests that Chaucer viewed Geoffrey's work with skepticism.
Obscenity exists in LGW to extend the "aesthetic credo" of LGWP, where Chaucer establishes himself "as a poet faithful to the contradictions inherent in nature." Delany argues that obscenity produces a more "natural" view of women than that provided…
Marxist rather than feminist, the book of ten essays holds that oppression of women results not merely from male dominance but from economic exploitation. The successful heroine Jehane in the thirteenth-century Franco-Flemish "Flore et Jehane" is…
Psychological and cultural interpretation of PhyT and ManT murders of women motivated by misogynistic violence and impulse to control women. Both tales displace attention to trivialities: woman and nature (PhyT) and natural lust (ManT).
Delany, Sheila.
Sheila Delany, Writing Woman: Women Writers and Women in Literature Medieval to Modern (New York: Schoken Books, 1983), pp. 36-46.
Chaucer individualized Trevet's "bluestocking heroine" to make Constance a mere "agglomeration of virtues"; emblem for men and women alike, Constance as Everywoman suffers with Christian passivity because suffering is the human condition; she is a…
In Chaucer's day the Epistle was regarded as canonical. In James 3.3-10, the theme is the tongue, the use and abuse of language--the theme not only of the Manciple's mother's advice but of the tale itself.
