Browse Items (16472 total)

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.

Chaucer's TC responds to antifeminsit treatment of the Criseida character, especially Boccaccio's; Henryson's version replies to Chaucer.

TC shows Chaucer's ambivalence about the language of courtly love; he uses it denotatively with romantic meaning yet reveals its duplicity through Troilus's idealism, Diomede's cynicism, Pandarus's manipulativeness, and Criseyde's combined sincerity…

Later medieval literature (as represented by Chaucer and others) demonstrates "cultural anxiety," manifested through marginal glosses, commentary, and illumination that make each manuscript unique, unlike modern printings.

"Sonotations" (generated by sound patterns that affect both denotation and connotation) appear in rhymed and alliterative verse.

Not mere ornament, the "effictio,"or physical and spiritual portrait, had become a fixed literary convention by the time of Geoffrey of Vinsauf. Bice analyzes Chaucerian characters from GP, KnT, NPT, and MilT, as well as from "Sir Gawain and the…

The popular tradition of conviviality in Merrie Olde England stretches back through Shakespeare to Chaucer.

Richard II's reign produced political upheaval that redefined treason not only politically but also as reflected in literary depictions of love.

In medieval literature, the human (especially the female) body is treated ambivalently--as ideal, as erotic, and as grotesque, as with Chaucer's Pardoner ("feminized male grotesque") and characters in BD, LGW, KnT, MLT, PrT, ClT, and SNT.

Medieval optical theory recognized two types of mirrors, one aiding vision and the other inverting images.

Writing for an audience that knew animals and animal lore well (from physical interaction, folklore, and religious tradition), Chaucer appealed to, influenced, and manipulated this lore in HF, PF, PT, and TC.

Among the narrative techniques employed to achieve authorial purposes, Chaucer's characterization of Dorigen in FranT shows her postponing her ultimately necessary conformity with male ideologies by contemplating authoritative tales based on those…

Lane's previously unedited and unprinted pastoral poem of 1621, modeled on Spenser's "Shepheardes Calender", follows Chaucer in using verse narratives of varying genres (e.g., fabliau and romance) to illustrate its themes (the vices of the age;…

The outworn paradigm of courtly love has been discarded but not superseded by a model flexible enough to contain the many variations developed by "moralists and gameplayers." Treats troubadour verse, French and English romances and lyrics, and…

After the anonymity of earlier times, fourteenth-century writing reveals increasing individuation and attention to the gender of an author. Chaucer's fictional women writers indicate an anxious sense on his part of declining "auctoritas, whereas…

Warfare and plague made English people of the later fourteenth century unprecedentedly aware of death. The Black Prince and John of Gaunt's first father-in-law, despite their heroic image in chronicles, died of unromantic diseases.