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Chaucer artfully uses meter to support meaning. The tensions between meter and speech rhythm, enjambment and run-on lines, rhyme and alliteration, and denotation and onomatopoeia all display his technical virtuosity.

The variations in narrative structure from BD to PF reveal a shift in Chaucer's belief from faith in the capacity of experience, book, and dream as sources of absolute truth to skepticism about these same medieval traditions.

Through study of Machaut's 'dits', we begin to get a sense of what Chaucer saw in Machaut's work. In addition to appreciation of his style, Chaucer must have recognized in Machaut's constant theme--human love, rightly and wrongly ordered--a sense of…

Boccaccio's "Teseida" is about social relationships and its theme is the proper behavior of rational people in a rational society. The KnT also treats social behavior, but its concern is people's attitude towards irrational, superhuman forces.

Rhetorical devices in Chaucer's early poems aid description, lend emphasis, achieve amplification or brevity, and mark transitions. The figures iintensify the utterances of characters, and characterize persons, concepts, or objects.

Explores problems in "Troilus and Cressida" in light of Shakespeare's uses of his sources, including TC.

BD displays the process of consolation as emotional change effected through the medium of epideictic discourse. In the act of speaking, the grieved knight apprehends the cause of his grief in a new way, and is consoled.

Study of KnT and ClT in light of their sources reveals the significance Chaucer was able to impart to his "translations". Study of PardT, and rhyme-royal tales demonstrates the poet's combination of observation drawn from life with that draw from…

In MLT and ClT scenes are juxtaposed and time spatialized. Dramatic moments never occur. In both tales, the shaping of expectations underscores the artifice of the poet.

Chaucer and Gower both saw life as a soul's endless journey. Both were concerned with the antipodal aspects of man's life. But Gower observed human conduct in light of moral and philosophical standards, while Chaucer never passed judgments.

The mistaken belief that sin was connected with death and sexuality led to the need to find a scapegoat. The result was virulence against women, Jews, or other denigrated casts. The virulence of the dominant group against the Jews in PrT can be…

Two mss and a copy of Caxton's edition contain marks indicating that they provided printer's copy for Thynne's edition. The readings which differ from the printer's copy indicate that Thynne also collated with other mss. Because of his access to…

In TC idolatrous love is rationalized by being conceived as one of the workings of nature. By Chaucer's time the Augustinian view of the valuelessness of temporal activities had been modified so that St. Thomas Aquinas could attach positive value to…

By the fourteenth century Augustinian idealism had lost ground to rising confidence in the experiential world. TC, KnT, FranT, and NPT all reveal the movement towards determinism. The idealism of the ParsT forms an opposition to this movement.

Through the game created by the Host and other references to playing, Chaucer created a festive structure for his tales whose movement leads the narrators, their audience, and the modern reader towards an ever-broadening perspective on life.

KnT, FranT, MLT, NPT, and ParsT all reveal the Providential plan for the world as benign. Despite the irony, CT upholds Boethian Christian ideals.

Comparison with its sources reveals that the changes in ABC destroy the unity but not the coherence. Chaucer's version comes closer than its source to fulfilling Augustine's recommendations. SNT falls short of its sources in conveying the ethical…

Medieval thinkers reverenced the word for its power to give order to experience, but Chaucer throughout his writings calls attention to the unreliability of the word.

Chaucer's poetry should be regarded as aural rather than oral. Aural poetry is less formulaic and digressive than poetry composed extemporaneously, but it too has special characteristics since it was to be heard and not read. TC reveals Chaucer's…

Theological commentators in the Middle Ages distinguished between the roles of "auctor" and "compilator." Gower seems to have modeled his main literary stances (as "propheta" in the "Vox Clamantis" and "sapiens" in the "Confessio Amantis") on the…

TC is used (along with later works) to draw conclusions about authorial self-consciousness. There are applications to the "persona" and the author's fictionalization of his audience.

Dante and Chaucer in effect parody classical tragedy while adapting their Ovidian imitations to a medieval notion of tragic form. They preserve the notion of suffering into truth, but they focus on the truth to be gained by the reader from the…

The romances of Chretien and Chaucer introduced the psychologically self-conscious character into medieval literature. KnT and TC make a distinction between the socially defined male, and the psychologically individualized female.

Chaucer's line shows tension between accentual-syllabic meter and strong stress. The result is a complex prosody full of variety. Chaucer's prosody should be studied in texts that use the virgule because modern punctuation blurs the prosody.

BD and HF show thematic unity of conflict between appearance (attractive externals) and reality (the authority of books). Replacing reality with worship for the artificial, mutable object is error.