Browse Items (16472 total)

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.

The Aeneas story as cliche is appropriate for the poem's subject: fame. The fame of Aeneas was important in Christian historiography, but ambivalent because of his betrayal of Dido. Biblical language and allusion rather than "the story of Troy or…

Architectural details, including rows of pillars and statues in Fame's hall, are probably exaggerations of the Palais de Justice, which Chaucer had seen in 1377.

Among poets who "present images of themselves both as poets and as readers" was Chaucer, though the idea-language model was not fully appropriate, as in HF.

The wording of these lines closely resembles the phraseology found in an Italian translation of Ovid's "Heroides." The line "Youre anker which ye in oure haven leyde" (line 2501) may be a sexual pun. Treats Boccaccio's "De genealogia deorum" as…

The "Legend of Dido" explicitly evokes its pretexts: the narrator names Virgil and Ovid and summarizes, paraphrases, and purposefully distorts the texts.

After a wide variety of classical treatments, Medea was transformed through the medieval concept of "fin' amor." Although her earthly passion is negatively contrasted with divine love in some works, she is canonized as a saint of love in LGW and in…

Treats Alceste as Christian emblem of transformation in LGW.

In LGW, Chaucer adheres closely to Ovid in the Pyramus and Thisbe legend. By omissions, by shifts in tone and emphasis, and by the frame of LGW, Chaucer emphasizes seeds of comedy in the original.

Presents an overview of Ambrose's "Hexameron" and argues the informing presence of the hexameral tradition on a deep level--though it scarcely rises to the surface--in the text of PF.