Browse Items (16381 total)

Physical and mechanical marvels suggest a mechanistic rather than a supernatural universe in SqT, Gower's version of the Alexander legend, and Sir John Mandeville's eastern marvels.

The "Seven Sages," the "Decameron," and CT share, in addition to frame structure and historical milieux, a concern with death and avoidance of it (plague), a changing sense of time, and a new concept of authorial identity (especially Chaucer). The…

Studies the manuscript transmission ("more akin to gene splicing than copying") of Old English poetry and prose, chronicle histories, and Chaucer. To establish Chaucer as a forerunner of later poetry, printers deliberately modify his works.

Dream poems by Machaut, Froissart, and Chaucer share not only the dream frame device but also historical-political content communicated in the language of love poetry. Love, war, and politics combined show change and a model of order.

Fourteenth-century English Breton lays, such as "Sir Degaré," "Sir Orfeo," and FranT, displace "Celtic" otherworlds to Brittainy and depict them as exotic, feminine, and supernatural-places of self-discovery that contrast with the domestic and…

English political claims to Wales depended in part on claims of Welsh incest; Millersdaughter discusses various texts (including MLT) in which this "heterogeneous, colonialist discourse" is evident.

Explores medieval attitudes toward the medical foundations of the emotions in MerT, TC, Gower's "Confessio Amantis," and Diego de San Pedro's "Cárcel de Amor."

Baker compares medieval and modern theories of textual production and examines the development of characters in TC by means of textual variants among the work's manuscripts.

Discussing MilPT, ShT, WBP, and SumT, Ward Mather argues that "Chaucer engages with the medieval genre of fabliau" to "develop a new theory of identity and social order."

Considers the relations both between TC and Boccaccio's "Filostrato" and between TC and Henryson's "Testament of Cresseid," examining them, not as sources or descendants, but as psychoanalytic "neighbors," fraught with "unsettling desires."

As in the worlds of Sidney's "Arcadia" and Milton's "Paradise Lost," the fictive world of TC is grounded in a key ethical concept. According to Bergquist, "Kynde or nature is the making and undoing of both Criseyde and the fiction that contains her."

Considers various tamed and untamed wild women in medieval literature, including two of Chaucer's characters: the Wife of Bath, and Emelye of KnT.

Considers MLT and SqT in a study of female xenoglossia (the ability to use or comprehend foreign tongues) in the later Middle Ages.

Schooler examines WBPT, KnT, and TC, using speech-act theory to reveal Chaucer's attitudes toward prayer as personal utterance rather than rote activity.

Examines the works of Chaucer, Langland, and Margery Kempe in the context of the standardization of textual discourse that accompanied the development of printed books.

Examines medieval notions of poetics and faculty psychology as approaches to BD, HF, PF, and LGWP.

Olsen argues that TC is an effort to "use poetry as a spiritual instrument," specifically in an attempt to link "celestial and earthly loves."

Discusses how PF, "The Assembly of Ladies," and "The Owl and the Nightingale" reflect late medieval court proceedings, gender issues, and eschatology.

Considers Chaucer's vernacular poetry as part of the discourse on "vestimentary appearance and consumption."

Examines treatment of Theban/Oedipal myth in Chaucer, Lydgate, and Shakespeare.

CT--in part a reaction to Gower's conservative conception of vernacular literature in "Confessio Amantis"--is a text encouraging interpretive autonomy.

Examines the development of Belial as a personification of the power of rhetoric to deceive; discusses Chaucer's Pardoner as an example.

Argues that Chaucer "uses prophecy as a way of proposing alternate, flexible modes of reading."

Symons compares and contrasts "literary" works (including Th and WBT) with popular romances, considering the differing appeals of the forms.

Examines the relationship between humor and religious rhetoric in a variety of texts, including CT, BD and TC.