Rudat, Wolfgang E. H.
Northern New England Review 8 (1983): 32-41.
The narrator in TC ridicules and condemns courtly love. The difference between TC and "Il Filostrato" is that Chaucer's narrator is unmasked at the end and earthly love must be rejected in favor of love of Christ whereas in IF the young narrator…
Rudat, Wolfgang E. H.
American Imago 40 (1983): 103-13.
Several passages in TC indicate a covert incestuous strain between Criseyde and Pandarus, the "senex amans" who uses Troilus to fulfill vicariously his own sexual fantasies.
With Chaucer's Criseyde (as with Malory's Guinevere), readers are forced to construct her character from the "implicature" of her acts and words rather than deduce it from explicit and consistent statements.
Discusses poet-narrator ambiguity in four TC prologues and the Epilogue and in the narrator's guise as historian. The narrator is detached and didactic but also compassionate and helpless.
Language is used to reveal or conceal. Warping his own beliefs, Pandarus in his speech redefines or avoids moral issues; duplicitous Diomede thinks like Pandarus, speaks like Troilus; Troilus's speech is forthright, literal; Criseyde is capable of…
Taylor, Karla Terese.
Dissertation Abstracts International 44 (1983): 1449A.
In TC, Chaucer subverts "The Divine Comedy": Paolo and Francesca's seduction by literature is metamorphosed to bookishness; Dante's self-authentication contrasts with the narrator's character in TC; and Dante's imagery and allegorical cosmos are…
Taylor, Karla Terese.
Comparative Literature 35 (1983): 1-20.
Argues for the influence of the Paolo and Francesca episode in "Inferno" 5 on TC, especially in shaping the reader's attitude toward stories of romantic, carnal love.
Van Dyke, Carolynn.
Donald V. Stump and others, eds. Hamartia: The Concept of Error in the Western Tradition: Essays in Honor of John M. Crossett. Texts and Studies in Religion, vol. 16 (New York: Edwin Mellen, 1983), pp. 171-91.
Chaucer's treatment of Troilus, the good man flawed by error, is compared to the treatment of Gawain in "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," with a source study of the "Poetics" of Aristotle and "De consolatione philosophiae" of Boethius.
Wack, Mary Frances.
Dissertation Abstracts International 43 (1983): 2343A.
Medieval medical writings on love-sickness emphasize memory. Memory of Criseyde's beauty, initially the cause of Troilus's malady, remains with him, combining with facets of Augustinian tradition, to permit his final transcendence. Annotated…
The narrator of TC, never overtly separated from the author, implicates and disorients the reader by inconsistencies, variations in person and syntax, seeming self-identification now with Troilus's naivete and now with Pandarus's deviousness,…
Windeatt, Barry.
Chaucer and the Italian Trecento (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 163-83.
Chaucer's use of Boccaccio's "Il Filostrato" as a source for his TC demonstrates three major kinds of creative "translacioun": innovative translation of specific words/phrases and lines, brief additions of phrases and lines, and the interpolation…
Deschamps had in mind Chaucer's short lyrics--Truth, Gent, Sted, Wom Nob--when he praised him in the ballads. These poems constitute Chaucer's advisory poetry whose subjects is moral philosophy stated in polished language and in French forms.
The poems to Scogan, Bukton, and Vache, and those to Richard II and Henry IV provide evidence of the makeup of the audience, with whom the poet shared an interest in good manners and good humor.
"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.
Ginsberg, Warren.
Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1983.
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…
Lucas, Angela M.
New York: St. Martin's Press, 1983.
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…
Schmitt, Jean-Claude.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.
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…
Kiser, Lisa J.
Papers on Language and Literature 19 (1983): 3-12.
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."
