Browse Items (16472 total)

Treatments of Dido and Aeneas in HF and LGW indicate that Chaucer develops a narrator-character who mediates actively between subject and audience in a more modern way than do his sources.

Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the Canticle, all ascribed to Solomon by medieval commentators, shed light on both Dante and Chaucer. The latter drew both on Ecclesiastes and on commentary for TC.

The question whether a poet celebrates the famous (medieval view) or seeks personal fame (Renaissance) is examined through classical and medieval traditions and in HF.

Following treatment of Peter Lombard, Dante, and Boccaccio, analyzes Troilus's two "cantici" (TC, bks. 1 and 5) for strategy, structure, and significance.

Redirecting the verse letter from Horatian urbanity and medieval rhetoric, Chaucer achieves an intimate, familiar tone. His successors from Dunbar to the Renaissance develop variously.

This triad, repeated through the romances and the Marriage Group, and the unifying figure of the Host, in both GP and the links, demonstrate Chaucer's command of rhetoric and his originality.

Lists references both to the Vulgate and to the mass, prayers,holy office, and hymns, as noted in the Baugh, Benson, Fisher, Pratt, and Robinson editions. The Latin passage, modern English translation, and Chaucer's treatment follow.

Discusses the artistry of Chaucer's GP portraits: their relationship to contemporary literary expectations and the "conventional medieval portrait," their order, their importance in creating a "sense or 'reality,'" and their "interaction" with…

The tradition of listing good women, dissociating them from their backgrounds, reveals varying attitudes toward woman's nature and rhetorical shifts from florilegia to debates; LGW is treated.

Images of the cosmos based on the liberal arts appear in the epics of Martianus Capella, Bernard Silvestris, Alain de Lille, and Dante. Chaucer parodies and humanizes the universe in HF.

Following consideration of the duality of women's nature in Old English poetry, chapters are devoted to Criseyde, to the Prioress, and to the Wife of Bath to illuminate their submerged qualities.

Despite some unenthusiastic criticism and even denial of his authorship of parts of the play, Shakespeare adapts KnT faithfully, reorienting its topicality, redesigning it for the stage, and broadening its focus.

Inheriting the tradition that women were either saintly or satanic, Chaucer grasped the opposition between rhetorical and mimetic treatment, as shown especially in LGW and ManT. Robinson applies medieval and modern feminist theories.

Aware of both classical and medieval rhetoric, Chaucer in BD undermines traditions of courtly love by juxtaposing the uncomprehending narrator with the knight, an effete psychic double of the narrator who is unable to accept the fact of death.

Supporting Robert A. Pratt's theory in SP 53 (1956) that Chaucer drew on a French translation of Boccaccio, Hanly explores parallels, both verbal and thematic; the likelihood of Beauvau as translator; and the possibility of Chaucer's familiarity with…

Unlike Horn and Havelock, who mature into heroism in fulfilling their vows, Chaucer's characters in FranT make promises that govern personal relationships; their "gentilesse" transcends class and gender.

In "The Boke of Fame," Richard Pynson published Chaucer's HF, PF, and Truth, plus Chaucerian apocrypha and five additional poems. Foley explores Pynson's life, examines manuscripts and editions, investigates authorship, scrutinizes alterations,…

The Aristotelian view that the marital relationship can involve friendship (found not in Augustine but in Aelred of Rievaulx and Thomas Aquinas) influenced Jean de Meun, translator of Aelred. De Meun's treatment of the matter in "Roman de la Rose"…

Kruger investigates the ambivalent nature of dreams in light of various classical and medieval dream theories, as well as actual accounts of dreams. The "middle vision," neither divine nor satanic, figures in Langland, Nicole Oresme, and Chaucer (BD…

Most scholarly treatments of Chaucer and alchemy deal with whether Chaucer believed in alchemy or whether he condemned it, but Chaucer's primary concern with alchemy was to use it as "symbolic language," especially in SNT and CYT. This salvific…

Surveys medical and historical writing as well as clerical interpretations of the bubonic plague. Treating literary representation of the plague as emblematic of ethical and societal cataclysm, Stieve considers the role of the plague in the writings…

Protagonist and narrative are usually aligned in medieval literature, but the protagonist is alienated from the narrative when his or her ethos conflicts with generic context, as in Chaucer's TC and CYT and in works of Malory and Hoccleve, among…

Through the application of Lacanian psychoanalysis, Schaber examines HF, BD, PrT, and PardT to determine the repressed objects, erotic and political, manifested as the body and understood as fantasmatic.

Characters' sense of identity emerges variously from the varying contexts in which the selves operate. In medieval literature, this sense of identity, allied to function rather than "object-self," is drawn through purpose; "his own romantic vision"…

Chaucer's poetry presents tensions between the authority of literature and that of traditional oral wisdom. In HF, the confused narrator cannot induce meaning; in TC, Troilus's mindset, Pandarus's and Criseyde's reliance on proverbs, and the…