Dronke, Peter.
Derek Brewer, ed. Geoffrey Chaucer. Writers and their Background (London: G. Bell, 1974), pp. 154-72.
Part 1 traces the influences of Bernard Silvestris and Alan of Lille on Chaucer's works, focusing on themes of fatalism (in MLT), cosmic ascent (in HF) and hierarchy and nature (in PF). Regards Alan's influence as "profound," especially in PF, and…
Describes a "flicker of humour" in Chaucer's allusion to Boethius in NPT (7.3294-95), indicating that the poet disagrees with his authority on the point of musical sensitivity.
Contrasts Troilus's ascent through the spheres at the end of TC and the narrator's comments on it with the analogous materials in Boccaccio's "Filostrato" and "Teseida" (with nods to Dante and Christian liturgy), explaining Troilus's placement among…
Drout, Michael D. C.
Prince Frederick, Md.: Recorded Books, 2005.
Designed as a college-level academic course, with a series of fourteen lectures by Drout on Chaucer's life, language, and works. Lectures 1-2 pertain to biography, language, and style; lectures 3-4 to the dream visions and translations; 5-6 to TC;…
Drucker, Trudy.
New York State Journal of Medicine 68 (1968): 444-47.
Describes various disorders, discomforts, and diseases among the Canterbury pilgrims and in their tales, commenting on medieval and modern understandings of symptoms and causes.
Drury Hall, Anne.
South Bend, Ind.: Saint Augustine's Press, 2023.
Reflects on reading and responding to "Great Books," offering appreciative descriptions of samples from Plato, Homer, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, and Melville, and asserting their success in conveying moral philosophy artfully, despite the…
Du Boulay, F. R. H.
Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1991.
Introduction to Piers Plowman as a lively mirror of fourteenth-century English society, directed to a nonspecialist audience. Includes a synopsis, derives Langland's biography from the poem, and reads it in light of contemporary social and religious…
Du Boulay, F. R. H.
Derek Brewer, ed. Geoffrey Chaucer. Writers and their Background (London: G. Bell, 1974), pp. 33-57.
Characterizes Chaucer's world as "lightly peopled," mobile, in economic transition, and hierarchical; characterizes Chaucer as economically successful, relatively untouched by tumultuous events, entertaining, modest, and with "a foot in several…
The dream-frame ("envelope") of PF reveals Chaucer's struggling with the problems of poetic composition, particularly of fusing form and context. The poem's unity is a function of the narrator's stance, more divorced from the poem's subject (Love)…
DuBruck, Edelgard E.
Uwe Boker, Manfred Markus, and Ranier Schowerling, eds. The Living Middle Ages: Studies in Mediaeval English Literature and Its Tradition (Stuttgart: Belser, 1989), pp. 103-13.
After reviewing scholarly opinion of the Pardoner's character,DuBruck turns to the somewhat neglected exemplum of the rioters to analyze narrative speed and style, by which the Pardoner drives his text to an emphatic conclusion. DuBruck then…
Dubs, Kathleen E.
Tibor Fabiny, ed. "What, Then, Is Time?": Responses in English and American Literature. Pázmány Papers in English and American Studies, no. 1 (Piliscsaba, Hungary: Pázmány Péter Catholic University, 2001), pp. 71-81.
Dubs considers medieval notions of simultaneity; describes Boethius's concept of eternity; explores Chaucer's uses of the zodiac in CT (FranT, MLT, GP, NPT) and Astr; and considers spring as the natural and spiritual season of renewal connected with…
Dubs, Kathleen.
Kathleen Dubs and Janka Kascáková, eds. Does It Really Mean That? Interpreting the Literary Ambiguous (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2011), pp. 35-58.
Through Harry Bailly in CT, Chaucer explores the literary tastes of his new audience. Although the Host's interpretations of Chaucer's tales are usually wrong-headed, Chaucer uses the Host to suggest appropriate audience reactions to various…
Duby, Georges, ed.
Cambridge and London: Belknap-Harvard University Press, 1988.
English version of of Phillipe Aries and Georges Duby, gen. eds. De l'Europe feodale a la Renaissance, vol. 2 of Histoire de la vie privee. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1985, translated by Arthur Goldhammer.
Duder, Clyburn.
Dissertation Abstracts International 41 (1981): 4707A.
Contains a glossary of all saints referred to in CT, with notes relating them to medieval art, plus commentary on fourteen associated with Reeve, Wife of Bath, and Pardoner or named in FrT, SumT, and CYT.
Lydgate was not an incompetent Chaucerian imitator; he used a different verse design. Parametric comparison of Chaucer's and Lydgate's verse designs demonstrates Lydgate's use of a tradition older than Chaucer's iambic pentameter. Lydgate had only…
Duffell, Martin J.
C. B. McCully and J. J. Anderson, eds. English Historical Metrics (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 210-18.
Surveys the development and scholarship of hendecasyllabic meter, identifying the innovations whereby Chaucer produced the first English iambic pentamenter and Gower experimented with variable caesura in hendecasyllabic lines to produce Anglo-Norman…
Duffell, Martin J.
Chaucer Review 34: 269-88, 2000.
Chaucer's model for the iambic pentameter line was Boccaccio's endecasillabo, not the French vers de dix. Chaucer introduced the "void" position, the "extra unprominent syllable within the hemistich, and possibly the epic caesura." All of his…
Duffell, Martin J.
Language and Literature 17 (2008): 5-20.
Provides statistical analysis of 300-line samples from the verse of eight poets who wrote in English (Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Longfellow, and Browning), comparing percentages of inversion and "erosion" among iambic…
Duffell, Martin J.
Language and Literature 22.1 (2013): 19-31.
Argues that, "while Tennyson thought he was composing quantitative hendecasyllables, he was in fact producing accentual verse of a type that English poets had been studiously avoiding for 500 years." Traces the development of Chaucer's iambic…
Duffell, Martin J.
Chaucer Review 49.02 (2014): 139-60.
Combines literary history with linguistic and statistical analysis to demonstrate how Chaucer's pentameter verse is closer to the Italian "endecasillabo" than to the French "vers de dix."
