Delasanta, Rodney K., and Constance M. Rousseau.
Chaucer Review 30 (1996): 319-42.
Chaucer's translation of this work, alluded to by Alceste in "Legend of Good Women" (G 404-18), has since been lost. Authors use MS Corpus Christi 137 as a basis for their work.
Chaucer intensifies the voluntarist diction found in sources of ClT, thus urging a reconsideration of the "Tale's" principal characters and of the will of God as it was understood in late-fourteenth-century England.
The metaphor in Eph. 4:22-24 of putting off old clothes and donning new ones influenced the use of this image in PardT, "King Lear," "Gulliver's Travels," and "The Brothers Karamazov." As the Pardoner's alter ego and a representation of human…
Summarizes critics' attention to the Eucharistic references in PardT and explores how the Eucharist and the Mass as a reenactment of sacrifice underpin a number of details and images in the tale.
Delasanta, Rodney.
Essays in Criticism 22 (1972): 221-25.
Critiques James Smith's essay "Chaucer, Boethius, and Recent Trends in Criticism," while admiring his sensitivity to nuance in Chaucer's quotations of and allusions to Boethius in KnT and TC; argues that Smith mistakenly attributes the attitudes of…
Delasanta, Rodney.
Papers on Language and Literature 8 (1972): 202-06.
Characterizes the Wife of Bath as "an ecclesiastical camp follower" who tellingly misuses her familiarity with Scripture and liturgy, exemplifying this tendency through her blasphemous use of the term "quoniam," which is the "opening word of the…
Explores the "interstitial pattern of errors about things literary" in MLPT that characterize the teller as a "not-quite scholar" and highlight a tension between his "rhetorical excess and religious exhibitionism" and his penchant for legalisms,…
Delasanta, Rodney.
Studies in the Literary Imagination 4.2 (1971): 1-10.
Assesses the pros and cons of applying patristic criticism to the study of Chaucer, arguing for typological rather than allegorical (or tropological) analyses and discouraging limited readings.
Delasanta, Rodney.
Modern Language Quarterly 31 (1970): 298-307.
Presents the Host as the figure of Judge in CT and identifies the judgment imagery in ParsP and elsewhere in CT, along with its Biblical and iconographical roots. This theme of judgment anticipates the concern with penance in ParsT.
Rejects exegetical readings of BD that construe the poem as a wholesale Christian allegory, but argues that Christian consolation is nevertheless conveyed through resurrection imagery (birds, horns, harts, etc.) and details of "sleeping, dreaming,…
Identifies a "number of medieval commonplaces" in KnT that support the notion that "greater idealism" is what distinguishes Palamon from Arcite, i.e., a "loftier" view, more a matter of theodicy than determinism.
Describes three groups of equestrians among the Canterbury pilgrims: those who ride proud horses, those who "ride either poor or at least un-caparisoned horses," and "those whose characters seem compromised by their 'inefficiency' as horsemen."…
Deligiorgis, S.
Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 70 (1969): 297-306.
Analyzes the relations between verse form and meaning in ShT and PF. In the first, patterns of closed and open couplets (where rhymes do or do not "coincide with syntactical closure") align with sententiousness and its uses; in the second, the…
Deligiorgis, Stavros.
George D. Economou, ed. Geoffrey Chaucer: A Collection of Original Articles (New York: McGraw Hill, 1976), pp. 129-41.
Chaucer used elements from linguistic to cosmological in raising CT to the anagogic level of symbolism (cf Frye's "Anatomy of Criticism"). Various tales illustrate this progression to anagogy.
Dell contends that Brian Helgeland's film A Knight's Tale offers an alternative to capitalistic perpetual accomplishment, the model of desire that critics associate with the film. This alternative is courtly love, a paradigm drawn from the Lancelot…
Dello Bouro, Carmen J.
Darby, Pa.: Norwood Editions, 1981.
Includes essays by Leonhard Schmitz (1881), George Dawson (1886), William Calder (1892), John W. Hales (1893), Frank J. Mather (1899), Henry C. Beeching (1900), Alfred Ainger (1905), George H. Cowling (1934), and "Chaucer at Woodstock" (1882).
Delony, Mikee C.
Priscilla Pope-Levison and John R. Levison, eds. Sex, Gender, and Christianity (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2012), pp. 33–57.
Examines connections between women's weaving and preaching by focusing on Alisoun. Uses the metaphor of weaving to establish how Alisoun "wove textiles and words as a mode of female expression and critique of the patriarchal church's interpretation…
Reads the Wife of Bath as "Chaucer's construction of the . . . female body as a literal and metaphoric text," and explores how depictions of the Wife in modern films respond to her critical reception as well as his original creation.
DeLuca, Dominique.
Albrecht Classen, ed. Death in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times: The Material and Spiritual Conditions of the Culture of Death (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016), pp. 239-61.
Refers to the death-bearing rioters in PardT as an example of the theme, found in medieval art, of "death as living within" the body.
DeMarco clarifies the classical and medieval distinctions between "public" and "private" violence and explores efforts to justify each type of violence, showing that Prudence's advice to Melibee is "secular," "pragmatic," and ultimately Ciceronian.…
DeMaria, Robert, Jr., and Robert D. Brown, eds.
Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2007.
Collects excerpts from various "British, Irish, and Caribbean Writers" (Chaucer to Seamus Heaney) and from various classical writers (Homer to Juvenal) to demonstrate classical influence. Opens (pp. 3-10) with a selection from WBP (ll. 627-822) in…
