Filios compares the folktale of Griselda with four medieval versions, exploring their adaptations. Boccaccio's tale is eroticized, with the teller Dioneo disagreeing with the conventional happy ending that reinforces dangerous power relations;…
Fincher, David, dir.
Burbank, Calif: New Line Cinema, 1995.
Murder-mystery action drama in which the serial killer uses the Seven Deadly Sins to organize his crimes. Includes several visual and verbal references to ParsT and CT.
Teaching in the humanities should entail continual reconstituting of relevance. Detailed analysis of the portraits of Briseis/Criseyde in the "Roman de Troie," TC, and the "Testament of Cresseid"--even apart from the long works in which they…
Findon, Joanne.
English Studies in Canada 32.4 (2006): 25-50.
Explores relations between medieval romance and medieval religious drama, focusing on the "woman cast adrift" motif in the Digby Mary Magdalene play. Assesses how contrasts between the protagonists' agency in the play and in versions of the Constance…
Fineman, Joel.
Stephen J. Greenblatt, ed. Allegory and Representation. Selected Papers from the English Institute, 1979-80, n.s. 05 (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), pp. 26-60.
Chaucer deals with the ways allegories begin and the ends toward which they tend. The pilgrimage is advanced by the allegory in the tales.
Finger, Roland.
Exit 9: The Rutgers Journal of Comparative Literature 5 (2003): 65-74.
Assesses the sexual relations between the Wife of Bath and her husbands in WBP as a dynamic between her sadism and their masochism. Through her sadism the Wife "avenges herself on the medieval patriarchal subordination of women."
Finke, Laurie A.
Leeds Studies in English 15 (1984): 95-107.
ParsT is not a moral touchstone for judging all the tales but merely another example of a character's way of ordering his experience of truth through language and deliberate rhetorical patterning. The plain prose style embraces only one side of the…
Finke, Laurie A.
Chaucerian Shakespeare (Ann Arbor: Michigan Consortium for Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 1983), pp. 7-24.
Falstaff and the Wife of Bath "use remarkably similar grammatical and syntactical strategies to manipulate language," to create "smokescreens" that cover their "nakedness," and "to try to reshape the world in their own image."
In the fifteenth century, Chaucer was admired chiefly as the founder of English eloquence, betraying English anxiety about French influences. The patronage networks that promoted Chaucer as a literary icon also promoted translations of the works of…
Finke, Laurie A., and Martin B. Schichtman.
Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010.
The authors survey a range of popular and artistic films, analyzing uses and presentations of the Middle Ages and assessing the interactions of the modern medium and the ancient material. The book includes commentary on Brian Helgeland's A Knight's…
Finke, Laurie A., and Martin B. Shichtman, eds.
Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1987.
A collection of essays that question "traditional perceptions of medieval texts and the fictions and ideologies that structure these perceptions" (introduction). For five essays that pertain to Chaucer, search for Medieval Texts and Contemporary…
Finke, Laurie A.,and Martin B. Shichtman.
Laurie A. Finke and Martin B. Shichtman, eds. Medieval Texts and Contemporary Readers (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1987), pp. 1-11.
Summarizes through Kaske (defender of patristic exegesis) and Donaldson (opposer) the debate in the 1950's and 1960s over textual meaning. In the 1970s, medievalists underplayed historical differences between their work and medieval texts. In the…
Finke, Laurie, and Martin Shichtman.
Kathleen Coyne Kelly and Tison Pugh, eds. Chaucer on Screen: Absence, Presence, and Adapting the "Canterbury Tales" (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2016), pp. 251-65.
Explores the "ghostly presence" of WBPT in the first three episodes of the television show "Mad Men," updating and remediating the "parody of Western misogynist tropes" in WBP, refashioning from WBT the question of what women want, and reframing…
Finke, Laurie.
Peter G. Beidler, ed. Geoffrey Chaucer: "The Wife of Bath." (Boston and New York: Bedford-St. Martin's, 1996), pp. 171-88.
A Marxist reading of WBPT that regards the "link between sexuality and monetary gain" as the "key to the sexual economy of the Wife's performance." WBP reflects the violence potential in "primitive accumulation," an early stage of capitalism defined…
Finke, Laurie.
Nicole Nyffenegger and Katrin Rupp, eds. Fleshly Things and Spiritual Matters: Studies on the Medieval Body in Honour of Margaret Bridges (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2011), pp. 209-28.
Addresses the male gaze "at other men's bodies," focusing on visual art and on "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight." Includes comments on Chaucer's "lingering over the details of Nicholas's ass" in MilT.
Finkelstein, Dorothee.
Archiv für das Studium der Neueren Sprachen und Literaturen 207 (1970): 260-76.
Identifies the allegorical traditions that underlie the mysteriousness of alchemy in Arabic and Latin writings, focusing on the sources, nomenclature, and descriptions mentioned at the end of CYT (8.1428-65) especially the comments on mercury,…
Traces the origins of the names Elpheta and Algarsyf, used in SqT, to "familial" clusters in Arabic star catalogs that were translated into the Latin Middle Ages and mentioned in Astr. Suggests affiliations of the names with the magic sword and horse…
Includes a section entitled " Das Pronomen bei Chaucer" (pp. 74-86) that examines Chaucer's artistic uses of the second person pronouns of address, focusing particularly on TC and including comments on WBPT.
Finlayson, J. Caitlin.
Philological Quarterly 79 : 225-47, 2000.
A major source of Keats's poem is the Middle English "La Belle Dame sans Mercy," mistakenly attributed to Chaucer in the 1782 edition of "The Poetical Works of Geoffrey Chaucer," which Keats owned.
KnT--a romance like none other in English--is clearly designed to set forth the Knight's "declaration of intent." An attempt to "order existence," KnT eschews both the "cosmic harmony" of the traditional romance and the "imminent defeat" of the epic…
A comparison of Chaucer's narrators and the narrative voices of the "Roman" may clarify the continuing debates on the characteristics of his narrators, their function within the dream poems, and their relation to other narrative voices.
Finlayson, John.
English Studies 70 (1989): 385-94.
Adduces evidence that Thynne's edition of 1523 is the work of a careful, conservative editor. Thynne did not invent his unique readings but based them on Caxton, Fairfax, and Bodley. In other words, his HF "is truly an edition."
Finlayson, John.
Studia Neophilologica 60 (1988): 171-74.
The unmistakably sexual connotations of the source passages in "The Romance of the Rose" for the table manners and motto of Chaucer's Prioress help confirm "the impression that there 'is' a deliberate tension directed between the ideal of spiritual…
Finlayson, John.
Studia Neophilologica 58 (1986): 47-57.
Though the first two sections of HF abound in expressions of personal experience--"I saw," "I heard"--the pattern of use and the shaping force of art and science undermine the trustworthiness of appearance. The switch to third-person narrative in…
Confused in definition, "romance" designates both a value system and a method of treatment. The presence of the marvelous, courtly love, and chivalric adventure is not enough to form a definition. A parody like Th helps, since it indicates what is…
