Browse Items (16472 total)

Wyclif believed in the absolute authority of Scripture, with the mission of the Church as simple transmission without modification. In SumT, CYT, NPT, and ParsT, Chaucer questions the possibility of rehearsing truth inasmuch as the speakers distort…

Unlike Dante, who recognizes his poetic "fathers" in the Divine Comedy and sees himself as surpassing them, Chaucer in TC adopts the stance of the translator of an ancient text but questions the value of its tradition.

Applies Freudian and feminist theory to three extracanonical medieval texts, presenting them as the "unconscious" of works in the literary canon. Also analyzes BD and TC.

Chaucer employs traditional garden topoi (locus amoenus, hortus conclusus, and paradys d'amours) to draw attention to precursors, to create discrepancy between CT context and tradition, to individualize narrators, and to show literary indebtedness in…

Mentions Chaucer among poets (Guillem IX, Marcabru, Dante, and especially Langland) who helped develop the distinction between history and fiction and who showed themselves to be individuals, not for self-promotion but to identify themselves…

By manipulating his presumed sources and through the voices of the narrator and his characters, Chaucer develops reader-response strategy with such rhetorical devices as repetition and wordplay. The reflexive TC shows both love and language as…

With the inevitable variations produced by different scribes, CT has been edited by copyists who interpret the work variously (e.g., as ordered or unordered). A critical edition of the spurious links is here presented.

Following Foucault, Root examines the theory that patristic tradition and ecclesiastical practice eventually permitted confessional self-representation, as seen especially in WBT, Livre du voir dit, and Libro di buen Amor.

Studies rhymes and rhyme words (the elements least liable to errors in transcription) and amends the traditional view that Chaucer could have written Fragment A but neither B nor C: fragments A and C are equidistant from B and could be the work of a…

This first in-depth description of MS. Harley 7333 provides textual information, lists editions, and describes relationships to other medieval texts. The contents shed light on scribal editing in CT.

Analyzes how GP and the dramatic links in CT affect reader interest and narrative. Suggests that the Clerk misreads allegory for mimesis and critiques Petrachan poetics and the narrowness of the moral, exemplary tales.

Of the five parts of classical rhetoric, "memoria" (including semiotics) has been insufficiently recognized. Chaucer's dream visions reveal interaction of memory and invention; "memoria" is also significant in Renaissance and Romantic poetry.

On the basis of insights provided by manuscripts (especially Harvard MS English 530), certain works by Hoccleve and Lydgate reveal unifying themes. To fifteenth-century readers, Chaucer's PF treated the relationship of common profit and individual…

The narrators of Filostrato and TC, both selfishly motivated, create irony through their misconceptions of Cressida's traditional image. Although Boccaccio's narrator distorts Boethius and Dante, Chaucer's narrator represents Criseyde's flaw as…

Once Harry Bailly loses control of the game unifying CT, those who remain playful and detached become winners. Both pilgrims and readers must reassess the real rewards.

In contrast to the uniformity specified in LGWP, the legends themselves, when examined in light of the nominalist principle of particularized language, reveal widely differing heroines, not indistinguishable victims. ShT functions as pattern; CYT as…

Although Chaucer and Christine de Pisan showed themselves well aware of the distorting mirror of gender constructions by men, the Renaissance produced even more misogynist views, especially in Jacobean domestic tragedy. Shakespeare, however,…

Freed from the false dichotomy of oral/writen literature, these three works are seen as history created through the fusion of oral and written sources (Bede), literary use of oral performance conventions (CT frame), and credible combinations of…

Ovid's Narcissus becomes polysemous, generating figures of language among "Pearl" (Dreamer as Narcissus); TC (narrator's drawing on the myth for rhetoric to link pagan and Christian); "Piers Plowman B" (Christian Narcissus and "dreamer-Will"); and…

In medieval verse (e.g., Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, King Horn, and Chaucer's works), tense and aspect of verbs prove more significant than previously recognized. Rather than serving demands of meter and rhyme, Chaucer's verbal…

Chaucer's works have been treated variously through the centuries: vernacular text teaching a diverse audience in debates over "Englishing" the Bible; both model and subject for translation to the Neoclassics; basis for study in the nineteenth…

Chaucer's handling of the dreamer-narrator of BD proves sensitive and subtle in its exploration of genre, irony, tension, and artistic capability; the poem foreshadows Chaucer's later mastery.

Bo states that seeing should be deliberate action. Chaucer, who uses many words relating to seeing (and apparently introduced some into English), treats failure to perceive (Argus, January, Walter, Troilus) and illusion (HF, MLT, FranT, CYP, and…

Both the historical basis for BD and its relation to Machaut's narratives have posed problems, but the dream-vision form can resolve them. Whereas Machaut used it to divide himself from his patrons, Chaucer employed it to indicate their "shared…

From Ovid, the blind Cupid connoted erotic love to mythographers, French poets, and eventually Chaucer (HF), Clanvowe, Lydgate, and others.