Rowe, Elizabeth Ashman.
Florilegium 8 (1986): 169-86.
The form of KnT not only is characterized by "layers of order and disorder" but also is "circular, interlocking, and repeating." Structurally, the tale can be divided into five parts: a prologue (lines 1-1032), the conflict between Palamon and…
Travis, Peter W.
Roland Hagenbuchle and Laura Skandera, eds. Poetry and Epistemology: Turning Points in the History of Poetic Knowledge (Regensburg: Pustet, 1986), pp. 30-45.
Chaucer's only beast fable, through the catalyst of parody, transforms a "literary primer" to achieve artistic freedom from past determinants. NPT "is an epitome of what Foucault calls the archaeological text," containing every major concern and…
Matsumoto, Hiroyuki.
Hiroshima Studies in English Language and Literature 31 (1986): 17-25.
Chaucer makes the best of recurring rhyme pairs such as 'joye'/'Troye', 'gladnesse'/'destresse', and 'pleasaunce'/'remembraunce' to describe the mutability of worldly happiness in TC.
Each of the five names Chaucer uses for the moon goddess denotes a particular aspect of the goddess. A study of these names in TC, FranT, KnT, and MerT and of the functions they denote helps us understand the personalities of the women who invoke…
Adams, Alison,Armel H. Diverres, Karen Stern, and Kenneth Varty,eds.
Woodbridge and Suffolk: Boydell and Brewer, 1986.
These essays, which relate to the development of Arthurian prose romance from the early thirteenth century to the end of the medieval period, are arranged chronologically and grouped by theme or text.
Anderson, David, ed.
Knoxville: University of Tennessee, [1986]
A catalogue of and guide to the 1986 exhibition of manuscripts and printed books of Chaucer's works and sources, held at the Arthur Ross Gallery and the Rosenbach Museum for the Fifth International Congress of the New Chaucer Society, in…
Deals with medieval systems of dividing life into ages, with ages based on time divisions, and with exhortations to overcome the difficulties of various ages and to act one's age. Discusses the GP Squire as a youth, the Wife of Bath's youth, old…
Clogan, Paul M.
I. D. McFarlane, ed. Acta Conventus Neo-Latini Sanctandreani (Binhamton, N.Y.: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1986), pp. 569-78.
The distinctive form of literary criticism in the medieval canon of classics in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries is evidenced by an examination of one of the characteristic types of treatise that resulted from the association of poetry with…
Newman, Francis X., ed.
Binghamton, N.Y. : Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1986.
Five essays dealing with the peasants' revolt, peasant resistance, the plague, and social conscience. For three essays that pertain to Chaucer, search for Social Unrest in the Middle Ages under Alternative Title.
Peck, Russell A.
Francis X. Newman, ed. Social Unrest in the Middle Ages (Binghamton, N.Y.: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1986), pp. 113-48.
Chaucer's work and alliterative poetry such as "Jack Upland" and the "Plowman's Tale" "shared a common audience." John Ball's letters, like Wycliffe's writings, invoked the mythic simplicity of the early Christian church, appealing urgently to…
Robertson, D. W.,Jr.
Francis X. Newman, ed. Social Unrest in the Middle Ages, (Binghamton, N.Y.: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1986), pp. 49-74.
Robertson discusses hardships such as war, crime, extortion, maintenance and procurement, legal abuses, and the ordinances of Edward III and Richard II that serve to illuminate BD, FrT, PardT, and the GP Wife of Bath, Prioress, Monk, Merchant,…
The levels of style of the first three Canterbury tales correspond to John of Garland's columnar figure, which is itself a memory locus derived from classical rhetoric.
Popular understanding of their works is a central issue in both Boccaccio and Chaucer. Boccaccio's urbanity and sophistication reflect the qualities of his cultured, mercantile audience. Chaucer (e.g., PardT) is only apparently more naive, working…
Prior, Sandra Pierson.
Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 16 (1986): 57-73.
Not mere humorous touches, Chaucer's complex parodies of the mystery plays of Noah and Herod cover "biblical figures and events, the contemporary religious drama,...and exegesis, which lay behind the widespread use of typology." MilT explodes in…
The Wife of Bath's performance constitutes a bourgeois, female countercommentary by a literate property owner to the dominant male aristocratic and ecclesiastical conceptions of marriage, sex, learning, and economic power in the later Middle Ages.
Friedman, John B.
Francis X. Newman, ed. Social Unrest in the Middle Ages (Binghamton, N.Y.: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1986), pp. 75-112.
Treats iconography, history of medicine, and history of science.
Jost, Jean E.
Medieval Perspectives 1 (1986): 75-88.
Chaucer uses a medieval commonplace--vowing--as a function of genre: tragedy, comedy, or fabliau. In PardT, fashioning an illegitimate triple vow to eradicate Death, and bound by sworn brotherhood, three hoodlums effect upon themselves a grim,…
Discusses a "fourteenth-century lending law" as a possible source of Chaucer's ShT, with its depiction of a "bourgeois financial triangle." More work needs to be done on Chaucer's knowledge of municipal ordinances.
