Browse Items (16376 total)

Sketches the rise of mercantilism in medieval Europe, and details the presence of the "bourgeois spirit" in Boccaccio's "Decameron" and Chaucer's CT, evident in realism, economic motivation, and challenges to aristocratic privilege. Similar in their…

Describes the emergence of "something very like a Ricardian literary movement," focusing on the ability of Langland, Chaucer, and the "Pearl" poet to accept the mundane world completely and yet remain detached from it. Connects this ability with the…

Galloway examines the claims to authority--traditional and innovative--found in prologues to Middle English works, with special attention to Chaucer's HF, LGWP, GP, and other prologues in CT (e.g., WBP). The essay identifies four types of prologues…

Quinn defines the genre of dream vision, surveys "standard readings" of BD, and offers a "re-vision" of the poem that reconciles its humor and sadness by imagining it as a performance some years after the death of Blanche. The poem may have been…

Describes various depictions of breath, breathlessness, and "vital spirits" that signal deep emotion in medieval literature, including comments on BD, TC, and KnT, among other courtly and religious works.

The geographic references in PardT, of which the stile is the central figure, represent a loosely symbolic, "moral" landscape that adds to the moral tone of the tale.

Uses of the word "fyn" by Criseyde, Pandarus, and the narrator invite the reader to consider the teleology of the various parts of the work.

In the development of the literary subjective "I," Chaucer's work--especially KnT with its images of prison and mirrors that become images for the exploration of subjectivity--greatly influenced subsequent writers from Hoccleve to Spenser.

Examines Gower's tale of Canace, the Man of Law's reference to the account, and the narrative treatment of the character Canace in SqT, arguing that Spenser fused them in his Canace. In his second (1596) edition of "The Faerie Queene" Spenser…

Contrasts the narrators of BD and HF and their attitudes toward experience and bookish authority, clarifying how the HF narrator is "rendered completely and comprehensively skeptical." Yet, the lack of an ending to HF encourages readers to transcend…

Chaucer plays on his audience's awareness that Boccaccio (not Lollius) is the true source of TC; he also engages in similar play between the pagan setting of the poem and its Christian message.

CT, like the intellectual disputes of the fourteenth century, is characterized by extremes. Applying David Knowles's discussion of the period to fragment VII of CT, Brown notes that ShT, PrT, Th, Mel, and MkT show the "tendency to extremism…

KnT and MLT are complementary philosophical narratives. In KnT, Chaucer turns "Boccaccio's narrative of event . . . into a narrative poem about wisdom." The treatment of Fortune is pagan, with Palamon and Arcite representing contrasting patterns of…

Although the narrator of TC tries to separate pagan from Christian and body from spirit, the poem's allusions to 2 Corinthinians are an "indictment of (his) disastrous attempt to sunder the heavenly and the earthly."

Argues that in reading BD medieval audiences would also have reread Machaut's "Fonteinne Amoureuse" and recalled other works by Chaucer's predecessor. Chaucer's derivative version of the account of Ceyx and Alcyone "thematizes the story as a…

Delany explores the "imbrication" of life and art in PrT and the expulsion of Jews from France in 1394. She gauges Chaucer's contact with Jews and describes the conditions under which Jews lived in fourteenth-century France, specifically the results…

Examines Chaucer's skeptical pose concerning theological and biblical controversies of the fourteenth century: "glosynge," parody, biblical allusion in PardP, PardT, GP, CT, and TC.

Explores how the "circular and recursive form" of Agbabi's poetic adaptations of CT in her "Telling Tales" (2015) "showcases" the "queer time of medievalism and the queer form of adaptation." Focuses on Agbabi's versions of Mel ("Unfinished…

Describes the "inbetweenedness" of language in Caroline Bergvall's poetic/performative "trilogy--"Meddle English" (2011), "Drift" (2014), and "Alisoun Sings" (2019)--including discussion of her uses of forms of "Chaucer's Middle English, as well as…

Assesses Jos Charles's "transpoetics" in "feeld" (2018), showing how the collection of poems capitalizes on the "historical ruptures" and other constitutive features of Middle English, mimicking its "malleability and fluidity." Also suggests that…

Shows that modern understandings of and distinctions among speech, thought, and signifying gesture do not necessarily obtain in Middle English discourse, and that Middle English literature "displays much more extensive narrative depictions of…

Explores how disability studies have expanded to include consideration of relations between "embodiment and literary form," focusing on representations of deafness in the fifteenth-century Castilian "Arboleda de los enfermos" (Grove of the Infirm) of…

Morris's decision to present Chaucer's works in "clear-text" format (without editorial apparatus) conflicts with Victorian theories of editing. Yet, his presentations of Ret and the envoy to TC belie his efforts to imitate medieval traditions.

Kaplan explores medieval and early modern legal discourse about slander and defamation. Though HF is concerned with the relation between poetry and slander, in Chaucer's time "defamation was not understood as having temporal consequences for the…

Until 1369, Wyclif, powerful and influential, dominated Oxford; the "Lollard Knights" were prestigious men of court;and John of Gaunt was patron of both Chaucer and Wyclif. Appendix applies Wyclif's ideas to Chaucer's poetry: Gent, Truth, Form Age,…