Ferris, Sumner.
Modern Philology 65 (1967): 45-52.
Speculates "about the real state of Chaucer's purse in late 1399," examining details of the poem "Purse" and the relative chronology of the poet's life records to conclude that he wrote "Purse" to Henry IV because of actual financial duress.…
Chaucer's PrT allows competing psychoanalytic readings from both feminine and masculine points of view, a conflict that mirrors the competition for predominance between male and female figures embedded within the text. These readings may be…
Ferster, Judith.
David Aers, ed. Medieval Literature (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1986), pp. 148-68.
Modern phenomenological hermeneutics offers a profitable method for interpreting Chaucer. Five basic hermeneutical principles can be illustrated by a close reading of FranT, including the imitation in real life inspired by the tale.
Ferster, Judith.
Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985.
Ferster argues that modern literary and hermeneutical theory (Gadamer and Ricoeur, etc.) can shed light on medieval works: Chaucer's characters "interpret texts and each other as texts," in readings influenced by literary tradition, prejudice,…
Responding to the growing custom of reading silently, Chaucer focuses on the dilemma that there can be no interpretation without will but that the use of will can lead to prejudiced, subjective interpretations. The birds cannot communicate, but the…
The primary mode of discourse, conversation, emphasizes the difficulty of communication. BD oscillates between two opposing views: the existence and dissolution of the self and the other. Chaucer gives the reader an awareness of the conditions…
Ferster, Judith.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996.
Outlines the mixture of authorial deference and criticism within a mostly English mirror-for-princes tradition, from the "Secretum secretorum" to Machiavelli. Historicizes the works of James Yonge, John Gower, and Thomas Hoccleve within particular…
Ferster, Judith.
Judith Ferster. Fictions of Advice: The Literature and Politics of Counsel in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), pp. 89-107.
Blends a "historicist" approach that sees Mel as topical to the later 1380s with "formalist" emphasis on its discontinuities and contradictions. Concludes that "in the context of the Appellants' struggles with Richard II,...the deconstruction of the…
Ferster, Judith.
David Raybin and Linda Tarte Holley, eds. Closure in The Canterbury Tales: The Role of The Parson's Tale (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University, 2000), pp. 115-50.
Argues that ParsT fits its teller. Seen in relation to its sources, the Tale reflects a particular and individualized kind of spirituality--a spirituality averse to physical pleasure, critical of inappropriate taxation, and ambivalent about…
Ferster, Judith.
Denise N. Baker, ed. Inscribing the Hundred Years' War in French and English Cultures (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), pp. 73-89.
Argues that Chaucer produced Mel to demonstrate his allegiance to Richard II and to challenge the Appellants. Mel deconstructs the advice of Prudence, whose "advisory coup" echoes the Appellants' takeover.
Ferster, Judith.
Corinne Saunders, ed. A Concise Companion to Chaucer (Malden, Mass.; Oxford; and Victoria: Blackwell, 2006), pp. 179-98.
Ferster explores the importance of genre for understanding CT, a collection of different genres. Discusses how Chaucer stretches, plays with, and interrogates genre by combining features of genre and the expectations they create. Concentrates on the…
Fesko, J. V.
In Ronald S. Baines, ed. By Common Confession: Essays in Honor of James M. Renihan (Palmdale, Calif.: Reformed Baptist Academic Press, 2015), pp. 17-37.
Argues that ClT allegorically "reveals key elements of a medieval doctrine of justification," reading Walter as God and Griselda as a "reformed sinner." The tale also "provides a window into how a number of key scriptural texts figured into this…
Fewer, Colin D.
Dissertation Abstracts International 62: 1827A, 2001.
The late-medieval sense of individualism (identified by New Historicists) produced anxiety among writers, including Chaucer, Lydgate, and Hoccleve. Through various genres, these writers show a need to redefine sovereignty.
In "Ars Amatoria" and "Remedia Amoris," Ovid provides "habits of thought" that give medieval thinkers a vocabulary to describe "the operations of what we would today call ideology," or the conforming of the self to conceive social institutions as…
Comic novel featuring literary detective Thursday Next, set in a world where reality and literature are permeable. Includes references to Chaucer, to discrepancies in CT, and to many works of fiction.
Chaucer, possibly familiar with the concept of the "poeta-theologus" current in fourteenth-century Italian poetics, actually structures KnT "in a fashion which parallels or imitates divine creation"; perfection of structural order counters the…
Fichte, Joerg O.
Willi Erzgraber and Sabine Volk, eds. Mundlichkeit und Schriftlichkeit im englischen Mittelalter. Script Oralia, vol. 5 (Tubingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1988), pp. 121-31.
Examines both "authorial strategies guiding and determining the reception" of CT and the reception itself--especially the "free-flowing live speech" of WBP and CYP, oralizations in KnT and MLT, dialogue in MilT and FrT, and figures of sound in…
Fichte, Joerg O.
Joerg O. Fichte, ed. Chaucer's Frame Tales (Cambridge, D. S. Brewer, 1987), pp. 51-66.
Stresses that genre markers influence audience reception. Surveys the "mass of single works called "fabliaux proprement dits" to determine "invariant elements," which are genre markers in four categories: "communicative situation, province of…
Fichte, Joerg O.
Paul Strohm and Thomas J. Heffernan, eds. Studies in the Age of Chaucer, Proceedings, No. 1, 1984 (Knoxville, Tenn.: New Chaucer Society, 1985), pp. 181-94.
In Wom Nob, Chaucer uses traditional "topoi" and rhetorical and syntactic structure in French style; Ros is a playful parody of these conventions.
The "Verginia Story" evolved from Livy to Chaucer in various literary forms, most often the exemplum. Chaucer adapted the story into a novella, developing a new narrative form.
A pattern of Chaucerian poetics emerges through four themes--courtly love, morality, order, and poetry--found in his early poetry (BD, HF, and KnT). Starting as a poet of courtly love, Chaucer overcame limitations of this theme by analyzing its…
Considers critical assessments of Chaucer's attitudes toward Arthurian literature in WBT and argues that Chaucer may have known only nontraditional Arthurian materials such as "Libeaus Desconus" and "Sir Perceval of Galles." This notion is…
Fichte, Joerg O.
Trude Ehlert, ed. Zeitkonzeptionen Zeiterfahrung Zeitmessung: Stationen ihres Wandels vom Mittelalter bis zum Moderne (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schoningh, 1997), pp. 223-41.
Assesses time and its relations with history and eschatology in CT, exploring how genre and variations in genre affect the depiction of time. Examines KnT and Th as romances, SNT and MLT as saints' lives, PhyT and MkT as exempla, and ShT as a…
