Browse Items (16380 total)

As bearer of the Word, teacher, muse, and pilgrims' guide, Mary provides a feminine model of poetics for Dante, Chaucer, and Lydgate.

Among the handful of converted whores, Mary Magdalene is best known in late medieval writing through the homily "De maria Magdalena" (which Chaucer translated) and the Digby play. These works reveal remarkably literal physicality in which carnal…

Though hailed as an innovator by his successors and subsequent critics, Chaucer adapted existing traditions in innovative ways. "Colloquial" and "aureate" styles had already been developed in English, but he juxtaposed them. He was less the…

Chaucer explores the limits of romance and extends them so that TC, KnT, SqT, Th, WBT, and FranT become "poems about narrative."

Froissart's "Chroniques" have shaped subsequent perceptions of the uprising of 1381. Although Chaucer refers to it only once, his placement of the simile in NPT is significant. Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine took opposing eighteenth-century views. …

Discusses tensions between disorder and coherence in the conclusions of "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," "Pearl," "Cleannes," and "Patience," contrasted to conclusions of works by Chaucer.

Although Old English poetry always depicts Satan as supernaturally powerful (while doctrinally powerless), late-Middle English works show him as comic, the boaster who must fail--as in the mystery cycles followed by the morality plays. In Chaucer's…

Expands Ernst Curtius's world-upsidedown topos through Bakhtinian theories of textual dialogue and the carnivalesque to reveal the rich variety of a wide sampling of medieval texts, including CT.

Pask develops a distinct genre from Foucault's formulation of an "author-function": the life-and-works narratives that emerge in the historical perceptions of readers of Chaucer, Sidney, Spenser, and Donne.

Although Renaissance Scholars have tended to deny subjectivity in medieval literature, medievalists have shown that Chaucer develops it. So does the author of "The Kingis Quair," an important but generally neglected work.

Medieval anatomical, religious, and legal ideas about rape appear in medical texts, religious rules, saints' legends, romances, and WBT. These works reveal cultural attitudes toward rape and women in general.

Secrecy about sex cuts across genres and develops its own forms of rhetoric, as seen in works from Petrarch's "Secretum" through the "Roman de Silence," Margery Kempe, and PardPT.

Medieval English literature often incorporates Latin in any form, from close translation to radical reduction and including wordplay and allusion.

The inadequacies of the two previous editions of Lydgate's "Fabula" call for this full treatment, based on all manuscripts and annotated with references to related works, including KnT.

Discusses the differences and similarities between classical Greek ideas and late Roman and medieval Christian concepts of tragedy, focusing on Lucias Annaeus Seneca and his influence on the works of Chaucer, Jean de Meun, and Boccaccio.

Penitential fictions in Chaucer's LGW and Gower's "Confessio Amantis" critique the amorous code in courtly literature.

Since secular narratives treat behavior, twelfth-century scholars regarded them as practical philosophy. Thus, internal debate and decision-making in both French and English romance are often based on theology and philosophy.

Chaucer's use of the word "craft" and its derivations in CT indicate a difference between individuals and the world they want to control.

Women furnish the "crucial means" for authors to adapt the Theban tradition to their own poetic vision.

Defines the extent of the laity's knowlege of the Bible in late-fourteenth-century England.

Post-structuralist analysis of Chaucer's use of Dante as a source in HF and TC, and Spenser's use of Chaucer's BD in his "Daphnaida" and HF in his Mutabilitie Cantos.

Ancient and medieval poems often received no titles from their authors. With commercial dissemination, editors provided titles to attract readers, as with poems by Chaucer, Wyatt, Shakespeare, and Dickinson. Authorial titles tend to orient readers…

The works of Chaucer's contemporaries (Clanvowe, Lydgate, Dunbar) and later admirers (e.g., Henryson) show varying responses, especially to HF and PF.

Considers the Hebraic and patristic in the philosophical and English background of Chaucer's poem.

Certain qualities of fourteenth-century London created a cultural atmosphere in which a new kind of poetry flourished, emphasizing urban community and its values.