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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"…

The Parson offers religious and philosophical consolation by showing how sundered thought, word, and deed are conjoined in the salvific acts of contrition, confession, and satisfaction.

No more than a fraction of Astr is translated; the largest part is Chaucer's own "practical prose." In the "translated" sections Chaucer expanded his source by a factor of eight; thus his version is hardly a "translation."

Chaucer may have used prose alone in his "Boece" for clarity and freedom where two speakers face universal dilemmas.

Three other ME poems--"The Parlement of the Thre Ages," "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," "The Awntyrs off Arthure at the Terne Wathelyn"--and BD associate hunting with death. In Chaucer's dream vision the hunt draws the narrator to the bereaved so…

The inscription on Blanche's tomb confirms that she died in 1368.

Exegetical criticism of Alcyone in BD misleads since it neglects the traditional significance of Alcyone (as in Petrarch and Boccaccio).

Psychoanalytical criticism provides an unsatisfactory view of BD. The structure is rhetorical and Chaucer "leaves the dialectic unresolved, the syllogism of consolation incomplete."

Birds as the participants in the "demande d'amour" game are comic, as is Nature the judge: her ineptness is both risible and serious, as traditionally she is limited by the Fall.

Four puns not previously uncovered in the poem are "astoned" (5.1728), "inne...oute" (5.1519), "in armes" (2.165), and "ese" (2.1659). The last three have sexual suggestiveness.

Explores stylistic and structural discontinuities and the resulting narrator-audience relationship in TC, "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," Lydgate's "Siege of Thebes," and Henryson's "Testament of Cresseid."

The medieval--especially the Augustinian--concepts of human nature comprises both the prelapsarian and the fallen state. TC and "Confessio Amantis" use this concept as a structuring device.