Smith, Jeremy J.
Derek Pearsall, ed. Manuscripts and Readers in Fifteenth-Century England: The Literary Implications of Manuscript Study (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1983), pp. 104-12.
Demonstrates how specific linguistic features can be used to disclose "scribal attitudes to the text being copied," using as a primary example a number of linguistic forms from "one of the most notorious manuscripts" of CT, British Library MS Harley…
Boffey, Julia.
Derek Pearsall, ed. Manuscripts and Readers in Fifteenth-Century England: The Literary Implications of Manuscript Study (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1983), pp. 3-14.
Investigates the "manuscript context" of courtly love lyrics, identifying their incidence and the implications of their groupings and solo occurrences. Recurrent mention of Chaucer's lyrics, and discussion of manuscripts that include "clusters" of…
Mooney, Linne R.
Derek Pearsall, ed. New Directions in Later Medieval Manuscript Studies: Essays from the 1998 Harvard Conference (York; and Rochester, N.Y.: York Medieval Press, in association with Boydell and Brewer, 2000), pp. 131-41.
Surveys the techniques and functions of identifying manuscripts produced by the same scribe (especially manuscripts relating to Chaucer and Gower) and calls for a digital archive of known hands to help identify related manuscripts.
Blake, N. F.
Derek Pearsall, ed. New Directions in Later Medieval Manuscript Studies: Essays from the 1998 Harvard Conference (York; and Rochester, N.Y.: York Medieval Press, in association with Boydell and Brewer, 2000), pp. 29-40.
Summarizes the aims and methods of the Canterbury Tales Project, describes recent improvements in the analytic programs affiliated with the Project's data (SplitsTree rather than PAUP), and suggests ways the data may help to clarify manuscript…
Driver, Martha [W.]
Derek Pearsall, ed. New Directions in Later Medieval Manuscript Studies: Essays from the 1998 Harvard Conference (York; and Rochester, N.Y.: York Medieval Press, in association with Boydell and Brewer, 2000), pp. 53-64.
Assesses the Internet and CD-ROMs as tools in the study and teaching of manuscript research, summarizing the potential and limitations of each. Comments on the impact of a number of projects, products, and Web sites, focusing on the Canterbury Tales…
Edwards, A. S. G.
Derek Pearsall, ed. New Directions in Later Medieval Manuscript Studies: Essays from the 1998 Harvard Conference (York; and Rochester, N.Y.: York Medieval Press, in association with Boydell and Brewer, 2000), pp. 65-79.
Edwards surveys attempts to "historicize" the representation of Middle English texts, from black letter type to computer transcription, focusing on the nineteenth-century efforts of Frederic Madden. Includes recurrent references representing the…
Hacht, Anne Marie, and David Kelly, eds.
Detroit: Gale, 2002.
Includes a brief biography of Chaucer, plot summaries of the frame and the tales of CT, discussion of themes and style, a description of historical context, a critical overview, a selection of sixteen critical essays or excerpts, and suggestions for…
Hacht, Anne Marie, and Dwayne D. Hayes, eds.
Detroit: Gale, Cengage Learning, 2009.
This encyclopedia of world authors describes how the works of individual authors "fits with the context of the author's life, historical events, and the literary world"; it includes a comprehensive index, printed in each of the four volumes. The…
Figg, Kristen Mossler, and John Block Friedman, eds.
Detroit: Thomson Gale, 2005.
An encyclopedic survey of medieval arts and humanities. The section on Literature, by Lorraine Stock, includes a summary analysis of CT (pp. 199-201) and a description of Chaucer's life and works (p. 205).
Lewis, James R., and Evelyn Dorothy Oliver.
Detroit: Visible Ink, 2009.
A popular handbook to dream psychology, dream lore, the history of interpretations of dreams, and dreaming in various cultures, with an entry on Chaucer (pp. 38-40) that comments on his biography and his dream-vision poetry. First published in 1995.
Rumble, Thomas C., ed.
Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1965.
Presents eight Breton lays in Middle English, each with bottom-of-page glosses, a facsimile manuscript page, a bibliography, and a general Introduction (pp. xiii-xxx) that describes the nature of the genre, its history, and French sources of the…
Aers, David, ed.
Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992.
Six essays by various hands explore and critique the notion of a steady rise of individualism underlying the traditional historical periodiztion of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Human identities in all times are functions of humans interacting in…
Mehl, Dieter.
Deutsche Shakespeare-Gesellschaft West Jahrbuch 120 : 111-27, 1984.
TC inspired both Albert Brooke's The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet and Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. Shakespeare's play is a "more serious and comprehensive reading" of TC, particularly its fusion of comedy and tragedy, than is…
Rudat, Wolfgang E. H.,and Patricia Lee Youngue.
Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift fur Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 55 (1981): 19-43.
The Virgilian "Iuppiter descendens" in CT combines the sacred and the profane. Sexual motivation governs the behavior and storytelling of some of the pilgrims. Medieval man was able to integrate the serious with the comical because he possessed a…
McDonald, William C.
Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift fur Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 60 (1986): 543-71.
ParsT's statement of the medieval idea (of Peraldus) that true virtue derives from nobility of the spirit rather than from nobility of birth is examined in relation to its treatment by the late-medieval German authors Heinrich von Langenstein and…
Barney, Stephen A.
Dewey R. Faulkner, ed. Twentieth Century Interpretations of The Pardoner's Tale: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1973), pp. 83-95.
Commends the "harmony" of PardT and "its capacities to elicit responses," discussing it as a tale that is "eloquent," intelligent, significantly expressive, unified, and instructive." Includes contrasts with PhyT.
Adelman, Janet.
Dewey R. Faulkner, ed. Twentieth Century Interpretations of The Pardoner's Tale: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1973), pp. 96-106.
Critical appreciation of PardT as "brilliantly constructed, simultaneously a parody of the very truths it purports to be about and a joke in which we are never quite sure of the butt"; pays particular attention to its "ragged structure" and how it…
Miller tallies a number of "hybrid derivatives" from before 1500, focusing on top-frequency suffixes. Examples and conclusions involve Chaucerian usage, including Chaucer's tendency to develop "non-technical hybrids" and to use "non-prestige French…
Sharma, Manish.
Diacritics: A Review of Contemporary Criticism 45.2 (2017): 54-83.
Shows how NPT, FranT, and Ret reveal the rigor of Chaucer's philosophy, comparing matter-form distinctions underlying these works with the positions of a wide range of notable philosophers, from Plato and Aristotle to Jacques Lacan and François…
Black, Merrill.
Diane P. Freedman and Olivia Frey, eds. Autobiographical Writing Across the Disciplines: A Reader (Durham, N.C: Duke University Press, 2003), pp.85-95.
An autobiographical reading of WBPT by a woman who was for a time an abused wife. Black records three different responses to Chaucer's materials at three different stages in her life, focusing on the Wife's responses to abuse by her husbands.
Kraman, Cynthia.
Diane Watt, ed. Medieval Women in Communities (Toronto and Buffalo, N.Y.: University of Toronto Press, 1997), pp. 138-54.
In MerT, the marginal communities of females and Jews maintain ambiguous statuses, serve as subtext to the "Tale," and assert the seductiveness of the suppressed. The ambiguity of the garden--exciting but exclusionary--is associated with female…
Vélez-Sainz, Julio.
Dicenda: Estudios de lengua y literatura españolas 37 (2019): 363-76.
Describes treatments of the Griselda story from Boccaccio's "Decameron" to Joan Timoneda's "El patrañuelo" (1567), tracing its transformation from a story intended to present Griselda as a model for humankind to a "manual for wives-to-be," including…
Vélez Sainz, Julio.
Dicenda: Estudios de lengua y literatura españolas 37 (2019): 363-76.
Compares versions of the Griselda story: Boccaccio's original; Petrarch's translation; and other rewritings by Bernat Metge, Christine de Pizan, and Chaucer (ClT), as well as the Spanish story in "Castigos y doctrinas que un sabio daba a sus hijas"…
Identifies a series of "parallels in plot and language" between Charles Dickens's "The Cricket on the Hearth" and MerT, arguing for Chaucer's influence on "Cricket," on the Strong subplot of "David Copperfield," and on Dickens's "Chaucerian aesthetic…
