Browse Items (16376 total)

Ret is a mature expression of a poet in command of his faculties and intent. The Canon's Yeoman's disillusionment in CYT provides preparation for Ret, while ParsT prepares for the abandonment of sin. Structure and design of CYT and ParsT validate…

Ret is a well-crafted, planned conclusion to ParsT rather than the result of a deathbed religious crisis.

Chaucer often used the horse-and-rider image as a metaphor for sexual "maistrie." In Anel the image illustrates Arcite's failure to exercise mastery over either of his ladies, chafing like a restless horse in the service of Anelida while playing the…

Astr (and probably Equat) may serve to show that Chaucer was not merely curious about astronomy but was, in the modern sense, an active amateur who made astronomical observations.

BD deals with a universal concern, response to the death of a loved person. In a Christian world the knight, mourning his lady, finds consolation by expressing her beauty and goodness in words; he returns to the present world with a suggestion of…

Chaucer's concern is in part with forms of subjective experience, expressed in a dialectic between images and "nothing" in a series of lateral movements of the aesthetic imagination. At the end the poet converts retrospection to anticipation, as he…

A focus on book 1 of this dream poem shows the poet moving among several attitudes toward authority: they include meek acceptance and assertion of the author's own independence of it.

The decade of residence over Aldgate, the gateway to the teeming life of medieval London, supplied Chaucer with the buoyancy and liveliness that characterize HF.

Plots the course of Venus astronomically to show the planet would have been clearly visible in the northwest in 1374, 1377, 1380, and 1382, and possibly in 1375 and 1379.

Chaucer's uses of the events of the "Thebaid" depend for their significance upon an historical perspective that placed the seige and destruction of Thebes" before that of Troy; thus, Chaucer uses Theban material in "satirical counterpoint" to the…

Argues that the phrase "slydynge of corage" used to characterize Criseyde's moral character refers to "infirmity of resolve" but also involves unstable affections.

Fourteenth-century practice recognized at least three categories of tragic narrative: "de casibus" tragedy, the Ovidian tale of the deserted heroine, and the tale of ill-fated lovers. In TC, Chaucer combined the first and last of these in a new…

Explores the philosophy and modern "philosophizing" and especially Bloomfield's location of the philosophy in the actual experience of TC, as for example, in the narrator's "historical hindsight," which is compared to God's prescience.

The literature of courtly love does not accurately reflect medieval behavior in matters of love and sexual relations. Criseyde's "Who yaf me drinke?" (TC 2.651) derives from the motif of the love potion, which symbolizes "the overwhelming, obsessive…

The double ending of TC reconciles issues about love raised in the story. Chaucer has made Troilus a lover in the tradition of courtly love but has also used Dante's "Paradiso" for his version of heaven. The pagan setting illuminates Christian…

Cross accepts the textual conclusions of Pace, making incorrect assumptions in regard to the poem's connection with Richard II and to Boethius's "De consolatione." One difficulty in Sted stems from a single lexical variation in the verb "envoi."

"Balade de bon Conseyl," or Truth, the most popular of Chaucer's short poems, is generally thought to be derived from the Bible and Boethius's "Consolation of Philosophy." Out of the twenty-four copies, only in one version does the envoy to "Vache"…

Trans. Joan Krakover Hall as "English Medieval Narrative in the 13th and 14th Centuries" (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).

Neglected through modern predilections that ignore the intellectual milieu of the fourteenth century, Chaucer's prose works deserve more enlightened attention.

The pedagogic techniques in "Liber Catonianus," a standard textbook used by Chaucer, show the combination of grammar and morality, the study of the "artes" as a study of ethics,and the integration of the ethical in the "Septennium" of the liberal…

Pandarus tells Troilus "don thyn hood," which usually has been intrepreted to mean "put on your hat," signifying that the prince should delay action. But "hood" had a secondary meaning of warrior's helmut, and the sense of "prepare yourself for…

Chaucer acknowledged his difficult role in using his "matere" --Boccaccio's "Filostrato"--and asked his reader to accept Criseyde kindly. Chaucer's transformation of the shallow Criseyde of Boccaccio into the complex woman of TC caused his "nervous…

Calchas's speech at the beginning of book 4 extends and enlarges the perspective of the narrative grown increasingly narrow during the course of books 1-3. Whereas in TC 1-3 the lovers are portrayed as increasingly confined--both spatially and…

In this last book Chaucer uses a number of devices inexorably to distance the reader from the personages in the poem. He suggests astral influence that brings about the inevitable movement of joy-to-sorrow in love.

Allegorical traditions of the Mars and Venus myth were adopted and elaborated upon in the Middle Ages to demonstrate that "passion for woman encroaches upon the masculine cares of war," as in Troilus's shifts from warrior to lover. In the Epilogue…