Browse Items (16381 total)

Chaucer's approaches to hagiography vary from ironic distancing in LGW to pious orthodoxy in SNT, preventing audience identification. Also treats Criseyde, Alisoun, and Dorigen. Griselda, a special case, is historicized and then dehistoricized.

Examines the "boundaries between licit and illicit forms of homosocial desire" in communities in late-medieval England. Assesses various texts, including MkPT, FrT, and SumT.

In medieval thinking, cannibalism became a marker setting off the Christian West from the barbarian East. Gradually, cannibalism came to be perceived sometimes figuratively, involving both the self and the other and a sense of identity. Ambrisco…

Explores the medievalism of three contemporary English writers; includes discussion of Chaucerian echoes in John Fowles's "A Maggot."

Experience, here defined in the context of feminist criticism, gives women the capacity to differentiate themselves from others as well as to identify with them. Gendered experience is examined in the works of many authors from antiquity to the…

Lives of virgin martyr saints became a majority in the genre, appealing predominantly to a female audience and providing "expressions of devotion rather than exhortations to devotion." Sanok discusses works of Chaucer, Margery Kempe, Christine de…

The romance knight needs chances to prove himself and achieve fame; he must act. The damsel needs words, often to ask for help. Nickinson treats "Beues of Hamtoun," "The Sowdone of Babylone," Malory's Alysaundir episode, KnT, and FranT, with…

From Old English representations of doomsday to medieval romances, "layered narratives" provide audiences with visual judgment. The fair-to-foul transformations of Old English sermons and "Christ III" give way to the foul-to-fair transformations of…

Study of extant manuscripts from fourteenth-century England reveals that Chaucer was familiar with Ovidian texts and commentaries of his time. He developed his own adaptation of tone and vocabulary, exploring the tension between courtly love and…

Based on two Latin penitential manuals, ParT is shaped to conclude CT with both additions and deletions. Less strictly hierarchical than its major sources, the Tale emphasizes the individual's relationship to God and human society.

Female characters may reveal the weakness or value of male characters. Crocker examines BD and TC, as well as Spenser's "Faerie Queene" and Shakespeare's "Taming of the Shrew."

Juxtaposition of sixteenth-century editions of works of Chaucer and Langland with Elizabethan plays and pamphlets shows how the later authors use "Reformation-inspired literary traditions" to develop a sense of popular traditions that bind together…

Computer-assisted analysis of "storie" and "tale" in context indicates that Chaucer uses them differently. "Storie" typically appears in relation to the historical, courtly, and clerical, associated with public memory and authority. "Tale" refers to…

Source study of "Ywain and Gawain," "Sir Launfal," and NPT that explores how the process of appropriation reflects social, economic, political, and ideological continuities and transformations.

Meanings of the words "women," "authority," and "language" change throughout Chaucer's works, depending on the complex and shifting relationships of speaker, persona, scribe, and audience, plus pervasive irony. Treats TC, LGW, ClT, FranT, and SNT.

Analyzes the relationships of "interpretation, authority, and female sexuality" in works by Boccaccio, Chaucer, and Sidney. TC and WBPT contrast a lady seduced by her reading with a woman empowered by hers.

Studies the medieval whore figure as rebel, outlaw, and heretic through historical and sociological analysis of the Norman Latin poem "Jezebel." Chaucer and Langland consider the whore evil but also emblematic of this world's carnal pleasures.…

The pagan prayers of Chaucerian characters are granted twice as often as the Christian ones. Pagan deities function as poetic machinery; the Christian God, as source of divine truth. Throughout his oeuvre, the poet treats prayer in accordance with…

In the Christian Middle Ages, epidemics were perceived as punishment for spiritual sin, though bubonic plague became so widespread as to seem apocalyptic. Grigsby treats "Pricke of Conscience," "Amis and Amiloun," the York Cycle "Moses and Pharaoh,"…

Most studies of the vernacular used in religious writing of the late-fourteenth century focus on clerical authors. Clanvowe, a layperson and chamber knight of Richard II, uses the vernacular to discuss Lollardy covertly. Otey examines works of…

Defines oral performance art as an artistic genre, with written representations of it also manifesting distinctive generic qualities. Ugoretz examines these matters on the basis of contemporary oral performance and analyzes them in relation to five…

Analyzes two works each from late-thirteenth-century Florence and late-fourteenth-century England in relation to the "Roman de la rose" as expressions of political factionalism in the vocabulary of desire. Concludes that "a loyal citizen is still a…

Although Caxton, Thynne, and Speght use comparable techniques to establish Chaucer's works by collating, restoring, and emending texts, their editions reveal various and individual methods.

Male-male intimacy evokes opposing reactions, positive or homophobic. Analyzes male-male bonds from biblical, classical, and medieval literature, including several English and French romances, together with chronicles attacking Edward II's and…

With the linguistic turn from mimetic to generative properties of language, the traditional understanding of many aspects of literary and intellectual history has been denied. Jolliffe questions this extreme position in the light of writers such as…