Browse Items (16379 total)

The Yeoman is an unreliable narrator who seems to confess only his own sins, holds contempt for the Canon; in his pride he is a "caricature of repentance."

The Manciple's skillful use of diplomacy maintains the Cook's friendship while preventing him from revealing the Manciple's shady dealings.

The Knight may have been modeled on (and a compliment to) Henry, Earl of Derby. The expedition to Ruce was not to Russia but to Rossenia, where English crusaded in 1390 and before. The Knight is "the worn-out but noble example of the cherished…

The pun on "pryvetee," meaning in ME "private affairs" and "private parts," mocks the orderly piety of KnT and becomes part of a series of sacred-profane juxtapositions which heighten the bawdiness and comic effect of MilT.

Treats antifeminist reversal when Absolon must replace his romantic vision of Alisoun with his experience of her bestiality, but Chaucer ridicules antifeminist themes and celebrates Alisoun's desirable physicality.

A reference in Matthew Parker's "De antiquitate britannicae ecclesiae" (1572) to Clare Hall, Cambridge, as "vocatum in Chaucero in fabula de Reve the soller Halle" (cf. RvT 3990).

Analyzes Chaucer's use of the science of optics in RvT.

Chaucer's reference in RvT 4096 to "make a clerkes berd" (i.e., "cheat") may be echoed a few lines later in the oath "by seint Cutberd" (line 4127), suggesting terms for shaving and castration.

Characteristics of the Reeve suggest stereotypes of a medieval devil: his beardlessness, Northern origin, phlegmatic character, and sharp wit. He fits all six literary types of the Devil in Hannes Varter's "The Devil in English Literature."

Chaucer individualized Trevet's "bluestocking heroine" to make Constance a mere "agglomeration of virtues"; emblem for men and women alike, Constance as Everywoman suffers with Christian passivity because suffering is the human condition; she is a…

ParsT is not a moral touchstone for judging all the tales but merely another example of a character's way of ordering his experience of truth through language and deliberate rhetorical patterning. The plain prose style embraces only one side of the…

The anonymous "Summa," dating from the middle of the thirteenth century, is the ultimate source of the "remedia" sections of Chaucer's ParsT. This critical edition, based on one of the nine surviving manuscripts, is accompanied by a translation…

In translating Bo from the original Latin and a French translation, Chaucer often adapts a word from the latter to create new concepts, especially with English gerunds.

Study of Bo in light of related French and Latin manuscripts reveals that the work may be an underrated rough draft. Chaucer strives for faithful and intelligible translation, rejecting alien structures and coining words as needed.

The origin of "forlynen" in Chaucer's Bo is the OF "forlignier," taken from Jean de Meun.

BD discursively performs the act of burial. Blanche's death is comparable to Freud's "primal scene"; her "whiteness" traces primordial obliteration; as in Lacan, narrative arises in loss.

BD can be read not as a discontinuous apprentice work but as "a myth of the invention of poetry," with its stories and images yet to be molded into psychological and thematic cohesion. Imagination precedes signification.

An edition of the fourteenth-century French text with English translation, introduction on Machaut and his influence on BD, and critical bibliography.

Attitudes toward grief are revealed in the way the speakers talk. Diction at the end of the poem suggests a resolution of divergent perceptions.

Analyzes the "sentence" of BD through its sentence structure. Any idea of "tragic reversal" disintegrates under the pressure of "forward-looking" consecutive sentences.

BD is a rendering of the archetypal Fool (the poet) and the King (the Black Knight), wherein consolation for death is provided by the Fool, a pattern also in "Solomon and Marcolf."

Treats BD as an elegy, examining figures of speech.

HF, a turning point in Chaucer's career and in English literary culture, reflects attitudes toward fame and glory from Homer to the Scholastics to writers of the Italian "trecento." The poem deals with issues of fame, poetry, and linguistic theory…

Despite the usual closure of the dream-vision form (as in Pearl), some dream visions are open-ended or exhibit surprising or disappointing closure. HF, usually considered unfinished, exhibits features of closure.

Although Chaucer typically "covered his tracks," a major source of HF is Plato's "Timaeus" in the translation and commentary of Chalcidius.