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.
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…
