Browse Items (16471 total)

Transmission of ancient Greek and Roman culture through Ovid to later tradition affected romance and shaped attitudes in popular literature. Heyworth discusses works by Marie de France, Chrétien de Troyes, Chaucer (with emphasis on politics in the…

Although many editors and critics of medieval literature assume a single authoritative text, literary authority may be diffuse. Crowley examines in detail the B and C versions of "Piers Plowman." Also treats the frame of Gower's "Confessio Amantis"…

The remoteness and insularity of England led to the belief that its people were different, both barbarian and angelic. Lavezzo discusses Aelfric, Higden, Chaucer (MLT), and the alliterative "Morte Arthure." Use of the English language contributed to…

Traces the Theban legend from Statius through a twelfth-century Old French version, school texts, florilegia, commentary, Boccaccio, Chaucer (Anel, KnT), and Lydgate. Also assesses relationships with ancient and medieval history. Lydgate's version…

Late-medieval lay meditation extended the subject matter (previously the life of Christ) and the boundaries considered suitable for vernacular material. Evans treats Chaucer's TC, John Metham, Thomas Hoccleve, Nicholas Love, and anonymous works.

Examines loathly ladies in Irish myth, Chaucer (WBT), Gower ("Florent"), Dame Ragnell, Thomas of Erceldoune, and ballads, focusing on two loci--court and forest--and kinds of power. Also examines the political significance of the refiguration of…

Authorial development from pastoral toward epic provides a universal creative basis, analogous to the human life span and close to nature. Assesses works by Plato, Virgil, Chaucer (BD), Milton, and Vladimir Nabokov (as lepidopterist).

Dante and Chaucer elaborate on the three aspects of the classical goddess who appears as "Proserpina in hell, Diana on earth, and Luna" in heaven. Medieval commentary associates her with memory. Chaucer treats her recurrently, sometimes parodically,…

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 fourteenth-century England, the sale of indulgences was supported by orthodoxy and attacked by Wycliffites. Poetic fictions transcend this simple opposition, as seen in the artful deviousness of PardT and the revitalized idealism of "Piers…

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.