Browse Items (16376 total)

Treats the works of Chaucer, Langland, Malory, and the Gawain poet from the social and religious contexts of court and monastery, town and country.

The open-ended frame of CT derives ultimately from Indo-European rather than Arabic aesthetic; Arabic influence on medieval Europe is nonetheless significant.

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…

Review article on Christine de Pizan's "The Book of the City of Ladies," Amazonian version of Augustine's "City of God."

Since literature is linear and sequential, the reader must reassess each line in terms of all previous lines to influence the total effect and alter perspective. Comparing Chaucer's treatment of the past to "Beowulf," Gower, and Malory, refers to…

More than a mere unifying element, the pilgrimage frame of CT introduces tales, sets the tone of complexity, universalizes the stories, prepares us for morality and mirth, and satisfies the Gothic urge for wholes within wholes. The Host is both…

Treats Chaucer's use of rhetoric in characterization.

Women narrators--Wife of Bath, Prioress, and Second Nun--seek either earthly or spiritual authority over men in CT and establish female poetic tradition, invoking powerful females archetypes.

In GP, Chaucer changed approaches, developed new techniques, and became increasingly critical of society. Increased use of similes suggests that the portraits of the Squire, Monk, Friar, Miller, Manciple, Reeve, Summoner, and Pardoner were added…

Refutes the view that Chaucer's portrayal of the Knight in CT and the portrait of Arthur in the alliterative 'Morte Arthure' are condemnatory.

Saint Jerome's defense of the merits of virginity for the sake of Christ and the evils of remarriage threaten the Wife, who attacks his teaching.

In SumT, anticlerical polemic serves the religious argument of Chaucer's conservative faith. The caricature of the Friar is purposeful and schematic: the tale mocks his carnality and literalness and calls into question the administration of penance…

Chaucer's close attention to Griselda's and Walter's faces throughout ClT makes allegorical interpretation insufficient. Walter's false faces emphasize his duplicity and cruelty, contradicting his correspondence to a higher beneficent order;…

The "Verginia Story" evolved from Livy to Chaucer in various literary forms, most often the exemplum. Chaucer adapted the story into a novella, developing a new narrative form.

Various legends, iconography, and etymology of Saint Veronica illuminate the "vernycle" emblem on the Pardoner's cap as a clue to his character and motives."

In PardT, Death is assimilated to man's moral being.

Analyzes Chaucer's use of Virgil for portrait of the Prioress,suggesting that her brooch has magical properties as well as a religious function.

Source for NPT translated from old French.

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).

Absolon's twenty manners of dance after the school at Oxford may be traceable to the Morris dance troupes in the Oxford area, whose repertoire numbered approximately twenty dances. Absolon is ironically linked to dances which cast him in the role of…

Examines the evidence for medieval views--mostly negative--about the significance of North, especially in England, treating RvT and FrT.

Chaucer changed the order of the five steps to sin of Peraldus's "Summa de vitiis" and followed Ovid's "Metamorphoses" (10.343-44) instead. Glowka speculates on implications of change.

A KWIC concordance of Chaucer's BD was produced on the IBM 4341 with a statistical analysis of the verbs on PDP 11/34 and VAX 780, using UNIX. Analysis of the subject-verb relationships, according to Case Grammar Theory (identifying participants as…

LGW satirizes the narrator's perspective on women rather than examining feminine virtue. Obvious distortions of the legends reveal the deficiency of the narrator's attitude: he idealizes women in passivity, irrationality, and stupidity.

Shifts of tone and tension between ironies of fatal necessity and fateful will create balance between appreciation of the lovers' nobility and pessimism about their frailty. The oxymoron functions thematically and modally: religious passion…