Browse Items (16381 total)

Examines fictional representations of Troy as England's mythic ancestor in TC, HF, Gower's Vox Clamantis, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and other works. Since Troy was thought to have led to later empires only through its fall, the city is an…

Works such as Pearl, PhyT, PrT, and Lydgate's Siege of Thebes present children as transgressive social agents whom society represses through ill treatment to stabilize traditional hierarchies.

Examines personifications of Nature in representative works to argue that allegory is a powerful tool of visionary literature.

Considers issues of gender, identity, and sexuality in depictions of clothing in poetry by Chaucer (Rom), Marlowe, Donne, Samuel Butler, and Milton. Through dress, Rom depicts the richness of desire and the roles of art and culture in both seduction…

Describes classical, biblical, and patristic notions of "counsel" as background to Chaucer's "transcendentalizing notion of counsel."

Legal terminology pertaining to land law is dense in fragments 1 and 2 of CT and in TC. Chaucer used the terms in informed ways and expected his audience to be familiar with their implications.

Explores how classical comedy (especially Plautus and Ovid) and medieval elegiac comedies influenced Chaucer's fabliaux and the fabliau elements of ManT, WBP, TC, and the Prologue to the apocryphal Tale of Beryn.

Assesses gluttony in CT and Piers Plowman, arguing that each presents consumption as both an occasion of the sin and part of its symbolic apparatus. In these works and in scriptural and patristic traditions, gluttony signifies human potential for all…

Seeks to explain how and in what ways illustrations affect reading, discussing the manuscripts of the Harley Psalter, the Old English Illustrated Hexateuch, the Marvels of the East, and the Ellesmere manuscript of CT. Ellesmere raises questions…

Explores conflicts between theories and practice of translation from Geoffrey of Monmouth to Thomas Hoccleve, focusing on how Lollard debates about translation provoked orthodox claims that the vernacular was "pestilential."

Using the electronic Glossarial Database of Middle English, Lay analyzes Chaucer's habits of combining native English vocabulary with Romance vocabulary in doublets and puns, a reflection of his bilingual imagination.

Constructs an Augustinian "rhetoric of youth" to assess the depictions of infancy, childhood, and youth in Boethius's "De consolatione philosophiae," Innocent III's "De miseria condicionis humane," and the "Roman de la rose." Then considers how…

Like Gower in "Confessio Amantis," Chaucer in TC adapts two strategies from Benot de Sainte-Maure's "Roman de Troie" to criticize chivalry: indicating how chivalry oppresses women and revealing the incompatibility of knightly conduct and good…

Medieval romance generally assumes that action is inherently a masculine activity and speech feminine, with both supporting patriarchy. Various English romances examine these assumptions (sometimes ambiguously). WBT employs them to subvert not only…

Examines Eliot's senior-year courses at Harvard for their medieval focus (in art, literature, and philosophy) in the light of primary materials (including Eliot's annotated Chaucer textbook).

Violence, induced by the impermissible crossing of borders, involves clashing social codes and evokes varying attitudes: Beowulf authorizes it; Juliana opposes it; "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" and MilT develop its ambiguities. Sir Gawain poses a…

Feminist criticism has changed perceptions of the Wife of Bath. Feminist critics perceive her not as a superficial and "garish caricature" of womanhood but as a serious person attempting to establish her identity, rejecting antifeminist tradition,…

Examines various ways gender, ethnicity, and disease interact with social class in selected texts. In MLT, race is less important than place in salvation history. The tale of Lucrece (LGW) seeks to keep women virginal for marital traffic. Erotic…

Explores how Caxton's technical and mechanical modifications of CT, Bo, Malory's "Morte Darthur," and the "Boke of Eneydos" claim authority for these texts and help to shape their audience.

Readers of medieval allegory look for meaning but find themselves obliged by many factors to revise their interpretations. Even the literal sense proves highly complex, seeming to shift as it develops, so that readers must reconsider. Moore analyzes…

Discusses how the narrative strategies and implied audiences of animal fables produce the didactic impact of the tales, assessing "The Owl and the Nightingale" and fables by Chaucer (NPT and ManT), Gower, Langland, Lydgate, and Henryson. Also…

Assesses the status of CT and three eighteenth-century novels as "transitional texts" between orality and literacy, examining such features as voicing, framing devices, and insecurity about the social and moral roles of the texts.

Entry into heaven and the approach to God properly conclude a pilgrimage, as represented by Dante and Alain de Lille. In ManPT, Chaucer inverts the topos to show logic and language vitiated (not transcended) as the Cook becomes literally drunk (not…

Late-medieval liturgical activities--especially benefactions and the education that lay behind them--resulted from a variety of conditions and motives and produced a volatile environment that influenced the rise of vernacular literacy.

Anatomizes the development of anti-Jewish sentiments in medieval England, arguing that the prejudices of Chaucer and his late-medieval contemporaries, which returned to traditional, exegetical stereotypes, were less malicious than those of the…