Aers, David, ed.
New York: St. Martin's Press, 1986.
Ten essays by various hands. For six essays that pertain to Chaucer, search for Medieval Literature: Criticism, Ideology, and History under Alternative Title.
Beckwith, Sarah.
David Aers, ed. Medieval Literature (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1986), pp. 34-57.
Drawing on Lacan and feminist criticism, Beckwith examines female mysticism as the only public expression permitted women in the Middle Ages and discusses the Otherness of the female and of God.
Bloomfield, Morton W.
Piero Boitani and Jill Mann, eds. The Cambridge Chaucer Companion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 179-93.
This updated version of Bloomfield's 1964 essay "Authenticating Realism and the Realism of Chaucer" discusses "authenticating frames" in Chaucer: the dream frame of BD, the historical frame of TC, and the social frame of CT, which "gives us a strong…
Boitani, Piero.
Piero Boitani and Jill Mann, eds. The Cambridge Chaucer Companion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 39-57.
Literature is both source and subject matter for Chaucer. In BD, PF, and HF, he transforms source material ("old books") into "new" Chaucerian texts with their own structures and themes.
Boitani, Piero, and Jill Mann, eds.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
Contains fifteen essays designed for new readers of Chaucer. Emphasizing criticism rather than introductory studies, the contributors introduce fresh insights to encourage new readers to delve further into Chaucer's poetry. Little attention is…
Bolton, W. F.,S. S. Hussey, D. S. Brewer, and D. A. Pearsall.
W. F. Bolton, ed. The New History of Literature, Vol. I: The Middle Ages (New York: Peter Bedrick, 1986), pp. 169-266.
Introductory essays on Chaucer's life, the minor poems and the prose, TC, and CT.
The century between Dante and Boccaccio saw the poet's role as prophet deteriorate. Boccaccio and Chaucer found a middle road between blasphemy and reverence wherein language has its own independent set of standards, as one sees in comparing the…
Buckler, Patricia Prandini.
Dissertation Abstracts International 46 (1986): 2153A.
Studies the literacy, education, and cultural milieu of Chaucer's audience, the courtly circle and the upper socioeconomic echelons, especially the GP portrait of the Pardoner and PardT, to suggest reader response based on theories of Iser,…
Corman, Catherine Talmage.
Dissertation Abstracts International 47 (1986): 173A.
Drawing on sources in rhetoric and preaching, Chaucer saw rhetoric "not merely as a collection of stylistic figures, but as a process defined by the interaction between a speaker, his words,...and the audience." He made the audience "active…
Crane, Susan.
Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1986.
Argues that romances produced in England, whether in Anglo-Norman or Middle English, share a consistent series of concerns that distinguishes them from French romances.
Delasanta, Rodney (K.)
Mediaevalia 9 (1986, for 1983): 145-63.
Chaucer's narrative style--describing a host of particulars in minute detail--was influenced by nominalist denial of the ontological existence of universals. But Chaucer's preoccupation with Boethian themes indicates a continuing interest in more…
Desmond, Marilynn Robin.
Dissertation Abstracts International 46 (1986): 2687A-2688A.
Studies medieval assumptions about and deformations of Virgil's "Aeneid." Chapter 3 presents the "self-conscious ironic" version of the Dido story in LGW; chapter 4, Chaucer's assumptions about the "Aeneid" in HF. Notes on Chretien, Caxton,…
Erzgräber, Willi.
Piero Boitani and Anna Torti, eds. Intellectuals and Writers in Fourteenth-Century Europe (Tubingen: Narr; Cambridge: Brewer, 1986), pp. 67-87.
Traces the theme of authority versus experience through BD, HF, TC, LGW, WBP, ParsT, and Ret.
Haas, Renate.
Julian N. Wasserman and Robert J. Blanch, eds. Chaucer in the Eighties (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1986), pp. 23-37.
Studies Chaucer's clever exploitation of the ambiguities between the laments of the lover and the mourner and his manipulation of traditional didactic patterns containing laments for the dead in Pity, BD, SqT, LGW (Thisbe), MLT, PhyT, ManT, TC, and…
Hardman, Phillipa.
Review of English Studies 37 (1986): 478-94.
Studies Chaucer's sources, invocations to, and use of the muses in Anel, HF, TC, and CT. The use in CT is humorous. In HF, the muses are a "metaphorical model" for the "art poetical." In TC, muses chart the changing attitudes of the narrator.
Higuchi, Masayuki.
Eigo Seinen (Tokyo) 132.7 (1986): 329-31.
Explores the notion of "comedy" in the Middle Ages, which is based on the idea of the goddess Fortuna, and argues that the comedy Chaucer refers to at the end of TC was realized in NPT.
Kelly, Henry Ansgar.
Gregory Kratzmann and James Simpson, eds. Medieval English Religious and Ethical Literature (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1986), pp. 92-114.
Reviews scholarship and corrects mistaken assumptions about medieval tragedy. The first vernacular writer in Europe to consider himself a tragedian, Chaucer was anticipated by several Latin writers but drew mainly from Boethius. The tragic falls in…
Sees Chaucer's world in the midst of change from feudalism to mercantilism. Threats to society represented by dream visions must yet be integrated into the rational structure. The CT pilgrimage is a Peasant's Revolt in reverse. Knight takes a…
Kratzmann, Gregory,and James Simpson,eds.
Cambridg : D. S. Brewer, 1986.
Nineteen essays by various hands emphasizing religious and ethical change and focusing on Chaucer's religious poetry and "Piers Plowman" but including religious writings in the Old English period and the sixteenth century.
