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Although Chaucer's version of the Griselda story closely follows that of Petrarch, ClT makes the marquis less sympathetic and Griselda more so.

Both "Pearl" and ClT use comparatives for contrasts with a notion of satisfaction signified by the words "enough" and "suffisaunce." The set of related words in ClT, including "sadness," "suffraunce," "outrely," and other words of degree and…

Analyzes the function of the proper names as playful, complex allusions, and associates with January--holder of the silver "clyket" to the garden--both Janus, god of passageways, and Saint Peter, who holds the keys to paradise.

Romances that parallel the SqT's interest in "meticulous attention to the niceties of courtly life joined with an inexhaustible appetite for marvels" were fashionable for Chaucer's age.

Analyzes the Canacee episode in SqT through "poetic and biblical exegesis" and compares it to similar materials in Malory's "Morte Darthur."

At first lacking in "gentillesse," Aurelius knows how to insist u0pon his rights, but in the latter half of FranT, he is transformed into a gentle squire.

Chaucer does not equate with his own morality that of the Franklin, who does not understand the issues he has raised.

Chaucer may be satirizing the pretensions of the contemporary upwardly mobile.

Melvin Storm's article indicates that pardoners were rarely accused of carrying false relics.

In PardT details from poison lore add to the sophistication with which Chaucer develops the central paradox of the tale: the Pardoner as a channel of grace despite his evil character.

"Modern" medieval sermons, as contrasted with patristic sermons, are not structurally rigid, but PardT follows agreed-upon elements and sequences of material and relates theme to form.

The Old Man's significance depends on audience reaction, not on learned traditions; readers and pilgrims might easily associate him with the Green Yeoman of the FrT, for he too "seems to be a devil wandering the earth in search of prey."

Through the images of purse, pardon, and false relics Chaucer constructs the spiritually degraded portrait of reality of a "gilty and ful vicious" Pardoner.

An automaton "who is both theologically and in ordinary human terms...dead," the Pardoner, whose sexuality emphasizes his deadness, may yet be redeemed in the words of the Old Man.

In his shameless self-revelation the Pardoner confuses and angers his audience by mixing boasting and confiding with their contrary expectations of approval and mitigated disapproval.

Outside of Lollard tracts, false relics were rarely associated with pardoners.

The Shipman and other mariners named ships after Mary Magdalene as protectress from shipwreck and death and, probably, because of her scarlet past.

Chaucer's punning in ShT is complex, some puns depending upon the eye ("tale," "tallynge") and others upon the ear alone. The Shipman imports into English a foreign form (the fabliau) and foreign (especially French) financial words "that hadden…

In the "Libro de buen amor" and CT, Dona Garoza and the Prioress are treated satirically, in a tradition based on reports of bishops' visitations to convents.

Pre-Christian and Christian traditions connecting "gallus" and "deus" bear on NPT, especially hymns of Jerome and Prudentius, iconography, and popular equations of the cock with Christ in apocrypha, devotionals, folklore, and slang. As antagonist of…

Latin, rather than OF, sources, especially the twelfth-century "Isengrimus," provide parallels with NPT. The fifteenth-century Low German "De vos und de hane" was derived orally from the "Isengrimus." Possibly Chaucer heard an analogous English…

The Hengwrt manuscript omits CYT and CYP, whose authenticity must be determined on critical, not paleographical, evidence.

In Chaucer's day the Epistle was regarded as canonical. In James 3.3-10, the theme is the tongue, the use and abuse of language--the theme not only of the Manciple's mother's advice but of the tale itself.

Chaucer has adapted "ironic hints" from the analogue in Machaut's "Voir dit" to a bourgeois persona that demolishes "finer sensibilities," thus ironically reversing the tenor of the older material.

The Parson's attribution of a statement on the Crucifixion to Saint Augustine has never been identified; it may be a "Freudian slip," or it may originate in Augustine's detailed discussion of prelapsarian v. postlapsarian sexuality ("The City of God"…