Browse Items (16377 total)

"The Pilgrimage of the Lyf of the Manhode," the ME translation of de Guilleville's "Pelerinage de la vie humaine," leads to an emendation of Chaucer's lyric, which should probably read (lines 38-39): "So litel shal thanne in me be founde / That but…

"Toune" in line 17 of the poem means "predicament," not a literal place, just as it stands for an abstract condition in the Harley lyric, "Lenten is come with love to toune."

Discusses church treatises, didactic works, and books of advice to daughters, or of clerical instruction to women, and mirrors for princesses, to reveal medieval images of women: the virgin, the coquette, the wife and mother, the ruler, the worker.

The ways of representing character practiced by "highly self-conscious" poets reflect the "shaping imagination" of these authors against the backdrop of tradition--rhetorical, philosophical, and sometimes theological. In Ovid character is poetic…

Ballad 285, in praise of Chaucer, draws from Brunetto Latini's definition of philosophy in his "livres dou tresor."

This book surveys the status, activities, and contributions of medieval women in such medieval documents as wills and charters; in treatises on theological, philosophical, and medical topics; in devotional literature such as sermons and homilies; and…

An exemplum of Stephen of Bourbon, written sometime before 1261, reveals and condemns an odd heresy. Near Lyons, a story has gained currency of a greyhound, slain by its noble master in ill-considered haste, after it had saved the knight's infant…

Why the digressions in FranT? Formalist criticism identifies Dorigen's digression on the black rocks as a free (abstract) motif and, paradoxically, as an agent of the plot (normally a material motif). Thus Chaucer makes abstraction the cause of…

Although early, BD shows the development of the Chaucerian persona as narrator--"the shy, self-concious man who seems to know so little about the truths he records so well."

In HF, concerned with the nature of poetry, Chaucer reflects fourteenth-century culture, reveals his debts to Dante and Boccaccio (Lollius), and deals with literature.

Nabokov, Barth, and Joyce have rediscovered the solipsistic mode of fiction of which Chaucer was an accomplished practitioner.

Allusions to several Christian saints in HF show that, contrary to the arbitrariness of Fame's judgment, the "natural consequence of meritorious action" is "recognition both worldly and other-worldly."

By deliberate excision lines 1188-1203 of LGW can be reduced from decasyllables to octosyllables, illustrating the different effects of the lines, especially the longer "breath" of the decasyllable.

Matches Augustine's "("De mendacio") moral distinctions among kinds of utterance with Anselm's logical distinctions among kinds of predication; discovers that Augustine refuses to recognize the possibility of "beneficent lying." Argues that Chaucer…

Ret, an "authorial form of self-elimination," is formally like irony; it is also a penance, which, also like irony, protects the author from adverse judgment. Thus CT irony can be neatly exchanged for Ret penance. Penance, however, a sacrament and…

Coss surveys Continental and English historical and literary uses of the term "vavasour" to demonstrate its varying meanings. Applied to Chaucer's Franklin, the term might convey an "old-fashioned air," but such connotations must be drawn from…

Reads HF as an index to English literary culture of the late fourteenth century--as Chaucer's "idea of fourteenth-century literature." The variety of genres of the work, its complex relations with literary traditions, its concerns with science and…

Characterizes the nature and conventions of Middle English lyrics, looking briefly at representative examples. Includes discussion of Chaucer as both a representative lyricist and one who breaks boundaries in his short poems.

Examines arithmetic aspects of Chaucer's poetry in an effort to understand the mind of the man. The arithmetic devices of RvT, ShT, SumT, etc. indicate the strong vein of "modernistic rationalism" in Chaucer, a distinctive feature of his mentality.

Demonstrates that "the parent-child relation is one of the central motifs" of CT. Focusses on MkT, MLT, PrT, PhyT, and ClT to argue that Chaucer explores not only the power relations between parent and child but those parallel relations as well…

Explores relations between literary inheritance and father-child relations in Chaucer's works. Chaucer's "unfavourable attitude toward the power of the father" is reflected in his plots and his attitudes toward his literary ancestry. Of Chaucer's…

Posits FranT as a major source for Shakespeare play, focusing on similarities between the two magicians. Revised version published as "Deceiving Appearances: Neo-Chaucerian Magic in 'The Tempest'," in Hillman's Intertextuality and Romance in…

Sensitive to contemporary political events, Shakespeare parodies Spenser's Tears of the Muses in A Midsummer Night's Dream. In addition, the dream of the elf queen in Chaucer's Th is the source of Bottom's dream, as well as Arthur's dream in Faerie…

Hurst argues that Shakespeare's Cressida is an "embryonic feminist"; Cressida compares favorably with Chaucer's Criseyde, who was elsewhere demeaned in subsequent accounts.

Brewer surveys the presence (and absence) of music in Chaucer's work, suggesting that Chaucer knew its celestial, theoretical underpinnings and enjoyed its zesty, earthy pleasures.