Browse Items (16471 total)

Includes a subsection titled "Detoxing England: Patience Agbabi's 'Telling Tales,'" arguing that Agbabi successfully detoxifies CT's "ideologeme of othering, most obviously in religious, sexual and racial dichotomies." Uses case-study comparison of…

Compares Jean-Baptiste Clamence, narrator of Camus' "The Fall," with other literary characters, including Chaucer's Pardoner who is a manipulator of language and rhetoric, "acutely conscious of his own evil, yet arrogantly intent upon exploiting his…

Treats Henryson's "Testament of Cresseid" as a sequel to TC, examining how its attitude and tone differ from Chaucer's work, largely as a result of differing styles, techniques, opinions, and points of view. Henryson's style and tone are harsher, and…

Argues that the satire in NPT is "better interpreted as general satire of Chaucer's age" than attributed to the character of the Nun's Priest. So-called "dramatic" readings of the tale falter because, for example, its "gentle satire of courtliness is…

Argues that Chaucer's "literary re-novation" of the Trojan source material, enacted in TC and theorized in HF, "is a matter of the purification and hybridization of foregoing traditions," terms derived from Bruno Latour. Explores the relations…

Considers the letter as a means of spoken and written transmission and demonstrates how the most important elements and functions of the letter prescribed by the "artes dictaminis" were put to creative use in medieval literary texts such as the…

Describes five medieval ways of looking at time (computistical, philosophical, mechanical, astrolabic, kalendric) and examines three Chaucerian passages that appear to indicate exact dates and time of day. Concludes that each passage presents an…

Considers Astr and three other treatises on the astrolabe, exploring what they reflect about medieval notions of time.

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…

Provides background to Chaucer's "championship of the secular clergy . . . and his satire of the fraternal orders," and considers how this attitude reflects a general, "secular tradition," appreciative of allegorical poetry and found in works by Jean…

Provides evidence for the "strongest possibility" that WBT "did not differ from other Arthurian tales but came to Chaucer from Ireland through Wales, Brittany, and France."

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…