Delany, Sheila.
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 3 (1981): 47-60.
In contrast to other analogues to PhysT, Chaucer "systematically obliterates social content" to deprive the characters of plausible motives. This "bad piece of work" is "pornographic or free-floating sadistic sensationalism, with murder as its only…
Delany, Sheila.
Sheila Delany, Medieval Literary Politics: Shapes of Ideology (University of Manchester Press, 1990), pp. 1-18.
Surveys utopian attitudes, including alchemy. CYT reflects Chaucer's awareness of the "genuinely subversive thrust" of alchemy as an alternative to Pauline-Augustinian orthodoxy.
Delany, Sheila.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.
Analyzes LGW as an under-appreciated work, using an ecletic combination of approaches derived from semiotic, historicist, and feminist theories. LGWP and the separate legends are coherent but not organic; they combine in their recurrent…
Delany, Sheila.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972
HF expresses the "unreliability" of authority, as evident in the "style and structure" of the poem. Defines "fame" as the "body of traditional information that confronted the educated fourteenth-century reader" and shows how and where HF manifests…
Delany, Sheila.
Piero Boitani and Anna Torti, eds. Mediaevalitas: Reading the Middle Ages (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1996), pp. 63-79.
In his "Legend of Holy Women," Osbern Bokenham "offers something formally similar but ideologically opposite" to LGW. Bokenham parodies Chaucer's work, thus reasserting the hagiographical genre that Chaucer undercut, and indirectly critiques…
Delany, Sheila.
New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Reads Bokenham's "Legends of Holy Women" as a parody of Chaucer's LGW, itself a parody of hagiography. By inverting Chaucer's parody, Bokenham critiques Chaucer's emphasis on the classics and reasserts an Augustinian emphasis on Christian aesthetics…
Since PrT is set in Islamic "Asia," the anti-Semitism of PrT makes little historical sense, since medieval Muslims accepted Judaism in ways Christianity did not. Chaucer's knowledge of Jews and Muslims has been underestimated, even suppressed, a…
Delany, Sheila.
David Gay and Stephen R. Reimer, eds. Locating the Past/Discovering the Present: Perspectives on Religion, Culture, and Marginality (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2010), pp. 1-21.
Delany explores the "imbrication" of life and art in PrT and the expulsion of Jews from France in 1394. She gauges Chaucer's contact with Jews and describes the conditions under which Jews lived in fourteenth-century France, specifically the results…
Reads Constance in MLT as an "Everywoman" who represents humanity in relationship to an "arbitrary and inscrutable God." Several abrupt descents into "crudity" in the tale remind us not to regard Constance as real, and contrasts with her mothers in…
Delany, Sheila.
English Language Notes 11 (1973): 1-5.
Studies the "ape-image" in HF 1212, identifying analogues in Dante's "Inferno" and in Jean de Meun's "Roman de la Rose," and observing that the topos poses the "difficulty of distinguishing true from false, original from imposture," and art from…
Surveys the roots of analogical thinking and late-medieval critiques of its methods and assumptions, exploring the background to understanding "Chaucer's curious neglect of the allegorical mode." As with nominalists, Chaucer is consistently concerned…
Delany, Sheila.
Comparative Literature 20 (1968): 254-64.
Shows that Chaucer's depiction of Fame in HF has several parallels with the depiction of her in the French "Ovide moralisé": use of anaphora in amplification of Ovid's original, Fame's role of judge and her "aura of authority," and overt concern…
Explores various denotations in medieval uses of "phantom," and contends that Chaucer's use of the word in HF (line 493) capitalizes on these meanings and neatly encapsulates the poem's fundamental concern with the difficulties of seeking to…
Chaucer's connection with Ralph Strode is important in shedding light on the poet's "philosophical preoccupations." His "tutorial" from Strode might have exposed him to the entire range of philosophical speculation of the day.
Delasanta, Rodney (K.)
Hugh T. Keenan, ed. Typology and English Medieval Literature (New York: AMS, 1992), pp. 121-39.
The pilgrim narrator of CT represents the views of nominalist epistemology, creating a tension in the text as Chaucer the poet continues to uphold a more traditional epistemology based on "ante-rem," "in-rem," and "post-rem" universals.
Delasanta, Rodney (K.)
Mediaevalia 9 (1986, for 1983): 145-63.
Chaucer's narrative style--describing a host of particulars in minute detail--was influenced by nominalist denial of the ontological existence of universals. But Chaucer's preoccupation with Boethian themes indicates a continuing interest in more…
Anecdotal revisitation of Harbledown, Bobbe-up-and-down, a mile from Canterbury. Chaucer himself likely traveled the Blean in official duties. As a type of Dante's "selva oscura," the Blean may have been in Chaucer mind in BD, TC, KnT, FrT, NPT,…
D. W. Robertson has already demonstrated the relationship between the Samaritan Woman (Matt. 4:4) and the Wife of Bath. But the similarities are even deeper, extending to an ironic typology of the harlot saved, including Mary Magdalene.
"Pace" Allen's and Sayce's ironies, dramatic and symbolic propriety for ParsT require penance, and predict, by the figure of the supper and the Host's unwitting use of Pauline imagery, an eschatological end.
Delasanta, Rodney [K.]
Providence: Studies in Western Culture 3 (1996): 285-310.
Assesses the Wife of Bath's admissions of lying, her glossings of Scripture, and her sexual punning as "nominalistic discourse" underpinned by her preference for the empirical and experiential over the universal. Disagrees with feminist readings of…
Delasanta, Rodney K.
Tennessee Studies in Literature 13 (1968): 117-32.
Reads NPT as the teller's attack on the "anti-monastic" Monk (as well as the "indifferent" Prioress), contrasting the "sacerdotal demeanor" of the two clerics and arguing that the NPT is opposed to MkT in both theme and technique, focusing on their…
