Browse Items (16471 total)

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…

Criseyde's garden and Pandarus's home are integrated symbolically with the theme of mutability in TC. Both sites display Pandarus's dream of circumventing mutability and figure his attempts as a go-between to shape an unchanging earthly union in the…

Places Troilus's Hymn to Love, based on Boethius, in the context of Neoplatonic metaphysics, cosmology, and theories of love (pp. 78-79).

Although the format (alphabetical) of ABC limits it somewhat, it follows the style of fourteenth-century religious courtly lyrics with a heightened sense of emotionalism. The struggle of the Virgin with the devil in ABC can be equated with the…

A heretofore overlooked list of internal evidence for Chaucer's authorship of Wom Unc concerns the source of the mirror image--the latter used by Chaucer in his Bo. Since Chaucer's lady is described in terms that smack of Boethius's Fortune, the…

Chaucer repeatedly depicts himself as a poet of love frustrated. Several critics look at the thwarted erotic elements in PF, TC, and CT, focusing on PardT, WBT, ShT, MilT, MerT, MkT, and PrT and the tellers of tehse tales.

The success of Chaucer's early translations from French cannot be attributed solely to his knack for finding the "mot juste" or to his "good ear" for English idiom. He drew on the native English poetic tradition for visual concreteness and…

A primer on Chaucer, introducing Japanese students to Chaucer the poet, his age, his language, and other basic aspects related to Chaucer's world.

Written by various hands in the fifteenth century, Bodley 638,the latest of the so-called Oxford Group, contains HF and BD, found in only two other manuscripts, as well as Anel, LGW, PF, Pity, ABC, For, and Compl d'Am. Includes a bibliography.