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…
Bestul, Thomas H.
Journal of English and Germanic Philology 82 (1983): 500-14.
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.
Rhodes, James F.
Modern Language Studies 13:2 (1983): 34-40.
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."
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…
Glowka, Arthur W.
Interpretations 14.2 (1983): 15-19.
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.
Logan, Harry M., and Barry W. Miller.
Sarah K. Burton and Douglas D. Short, eds. Sixth International Conference on Computers and the Humanities (Rockville, MD.: Computer Science Press, 1983), pp. 384-90.
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…
Hansen, Elaine Tuttle.
Journal of English and Germanic Philology 82 (1983): 11-31.
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.
Lawton, David.
Leeds Studies in English 14 (1983): 94-115.
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…
Tkacz, Catherine Brown.
Ball State University Forum 24:3 (1983): 3-12.
As Deiphebus observes (TC 2.1572), Troilus is indeed "sick" from love. Following Boethian medical imagery in "Consolatio," bk. 1, Chaucer interprets his passion as a moral disease: Troilus declines through affection, passion,and bestiality into…
Ross, Thomas W., ed.
Norman: University of Oklahoma, 1983.
The first CT "Variorum" to appear, Ross's edition, based on the Hengwrt, collates ten manuscripts and twenty printed editions with full critical apparatus to "present the MilT as Chaucer wrote it, as nearly as our present knowledge and resources…
Beadle, Richard, and J. J. Griffiths, intro.
Norman, Okla.: Pilgrim Books, 1983.
A fifteenth-century manuscript of major importance in establishing the TC text--which contains in a sixteenth-century hand Henryson's "Testament of Cresseid" also.
