Browse Items (16471 total)

Presents an overview of Ambrose's "Hexameron" and argues the informing presence of the hexameral tradition on a deep level--though it scarcely rises to the surface--in the text of PF.

Surveys the biblical, folkloric, and courtly imagery of thorns and hawthorn trees, which indicate the "presence of misguided love." Considers use of the imagery in a wide variety of works, including KnT and some Chaucerian apocrypha.

Argues for an ironic reading of "The Kingis Quair," interpreting Minerva as an ally of Venus. TC influenced the author's view of Minerva, and the protagonist's decision to follow his will rather than reason places him in sinful subjection to…

Thought to be the work of Chaucer until 1775, Roos's translation clarifies the role of the Lover as a "woful lover." The humor and criticism of the poem are aimed at the Lover, not the Lady.

Thought to be the work of Chaucer until the 1870s and long read largely for its style, "The Floure and the Leafe" is an ironic allegory warning readers not to "succumb to the deceptions that have befallen both the Flower and the Leaf." The details…

Thought to be the work of Chaucer until the 1870s, "The Court of Love" manipulates the conventions of love lyric and allegory, including several details from LGW, PF, and Pity. Such manipulation produces humor, depicting Philogenet as a kind of…

Long considered a work by Chaucer, "The Cuckoo and the Nightingale" is probably by his friend, Sir John Clanvowe. It is a work of considerable wit and subtlety, presenting a "libidinous narrator," a virtuous cuckoo who embodies Christian truth, and…

Reads Lydgate's "Temple of Glas" as a "sustained, ironic treatment of frustrated love," citing the following as sources of details of the poem and influences on its formal techniques: "Roman de la Rose," HF, TC, PF, KnT, and MerT.

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.