Browse Items (16377 total)

Discusses various levels of difficulty in translating CT and "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" into Modern English.

Situates Chaucer's attitudes toward law and legal process in late-medieval thought, discussing statute law, legal procedures of resolution by love, and Italian, Thomistic, post-Glossarian philosophy of law. Tale-telling and pilgrimage represent two…

Traces views of the medieval church and of Chaucer's sources for BD and PF. Treats love based on reason, affection, and friendship in sources: Aelred of Rievaulx, Jean de Meun, Thomas Aquinas, and Aristotle.

As part of a larger consideration of dream poems and medieval ritual, Horsley argues that Chaucer intended liturgical elements of LGWP to evoke saints' day ceremonies recorded in the Sarum Missal.

Examines the "many ways in which the I-speaker has been deployed by both Chaucer and Chaucerians," considering concepts of the persona, influences from Chaucer's biographies, and representations of the poet in his short poems and CT.

Argues "that medieval writers of beast literature probed the limitations and possibilities of defining legal personhood, thus exposing the boundary between humans and nonhuman animals to be not merely blurry, but permeable." Includes discussion of…

Addresses lovesickness in TC, John Gower's "Confessio Amantis," and "The Book of Margery Kempe," considering it "as an embodied and thus imminent process that organizes relationships around culturally defined ideas of either negotiation and mutuality…

Reads CYPT as Chaucer's response to the "pretentiousness, perverseness, and confusion he found in alchemy," exploring the poet's knowledge of alchemical sources, the place of CYPT in CT (especially in juxtaposition with SNT), and the skill and irony…

Edits "two glossed texts" of the "Disticha Catonis," constructed for use by students of Chaucer, Langland, and Gower. The Introduction juxtaposes passages from their poetry with "Catonian materials" to indicate the "poets' indebtedness" to the text…

Comments on Chaucer's possible access to Dante's works before traveling to Italy in 1372, and explores the "literary relationship of the two writers," arguing that "Chaucer drew on Dante not heavily but over many years," principally for the Ugolino…

Ranges throughout Chaucer's corpus, exploring imagery in a wide variety of works, arranged in five chapters: "Chaucer's Imagery and the Colors of Rhetoric," "The Appropriateness of the Subject Matter in Chaucer's Imagery," "Chaucer's Treatment of…

Identifies the "characteristics" of Chaucer's prose style in Bo, Mel, ParT, and Astr, comparing and contrasting them, and arguing that his reputation as a prose stylist has suffered because of linguistic changes and changes in taste.

Addresses "source relationships of geographical matters" in Chaucer. Chaucer's cosmography and its sources, and other "geographical matters," arguing that Chaucer "makes more frequent use of geography than do most of his contemporaries." Focuses on…

Places the medieval "Jaloux tale" in "its philosophic and historical framework," rooted in the marriage controversies of Sts. Augustine and Jerome with the Pelagians, Manichee, and Jovinians Traces the tradition in French humanists of the twelfth and…

Aligns Chaucer's style, themes, and characterization in TC with Renaissance humanism more than with medieval conventions, genres, and rhetoric, arguing that the poem anticipates the "poetry of Shakespeare's century" in its fusing realism, epic, and…

Compares TC with Boccaccio's "Filostrato," arguing that Chaucer "adapted more portions" of it "than has previously been noticed," subordinating formulas, conventions, thematic concerns, and moral concerns to artful construction and "psychological…

Includes discussion of relations between "storm motifs" and "traditional attitudes towards love (conceived broadly as the relationship between man and the objects of his desire)" in various medieval texts, including BD, TC, MilT, MLT, and ABC.

Boehler employs the concept of "shame culture" (which emphasizes satisfaction and honor over personal happiness, or even survival) as a means to examine medieval heroes (including those in KnT.) Ultimately, shame culture contributes not only to the…

Surveys the intellectual and social backgrounds of medieval understandings of nobility and "gentilesse," and analyzes noble birth and noble action in TC and CT, especially the ironies of failed "noble potential" in TC, the framing noble ideals of the…

Studies the Collation Text and the Printer's Copy of Tyrwhitt's edition of CT, identifying his reliance on two manuscript witnesses--British Library Harley 7335 and Cambridge University Library Dd.4.24--and establishing "his fidelity to the…

Compares and contrasts Chaucer's and Langland's views of the "lower clergy" (monks, friars, and parish priests) in light of the "religious backgrounds" of their age, arguing that despite their stylistic differences their views are very similar in…

Item not seen; Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Lists, describes, and evaluates some thirty translations and adaptations of Chaucer's works published in books and magazines between 1792 and 1841.

Studies the "form in which Chaucer may have known Statius' poetry," focusing on "medieval glossed manuscripts" in order to identify correspondences between the poetry of Statius, commentaries on it, and Chaucer's works. Assesses the status of Statius…

Traces the development of the notion of mutability from decay to progress, with related motifs, and assesses its place in Boethius' "Consolation of Philosophy" and the "De Contemptu Mundi" of Innocent III. Then examines Chaucer's "peculiar…