Krochalis, Jeanne E.
Chaucer Review 21 (1986): 234-45.
Hoccleve's request for a portrait (supplied in the Harley 4866 MS of "The Regement of Princes") is something new: the author's likenesses had heretofore been stylized. Hoccleve's lines (4992-5012) place Chaucer in a holy or ecclesiastical setting. …
Mann, Jill.
Piero Boitani and Jill Mann, eds. The Cambridge Chaucer Companion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 75-92.
Chaucer painstakingly "alerts" his sources in Boethius and Boccaccio to "emphasize the role of chance in the events of the narrative." Mann explores relationships among chance, "necessitee," and free will in TC and KnT.
McSparran, Frances, ed.
London: Oxford University Press, 1986.
This edition of the northern version of the Middle English romance "Octovian" complements the editor's earlier edition of the southern version in the MET series (Heidelberg, 1979) and includes a full introduction, apparatus, notes, and glossary. The…
Mehl, Dieter.
Piero Boitani and Jill Mann, eds. The Cambridge Chaucer Companion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 213-26.
The Chaucerian narrator "directs our responses and controls the narrative situation" but does not give definite answers. The narrators of BD, HF, PF, and LGW are not necessarily representative of Chaucer himself. The ever-present narrator of TC…
Mehl, Dieter.
Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
A revised, expanded translation of "Geoffrey Chaucer: Eine Einfuhrung in seine erzahlenden Dichtungen" (1973), with studies on BD, PF, HF, and CT; an updated bibliography; and an added chapter on LGW.
Miller, Jacqueline T.
New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986.
Investigates the "interaction between literary authority and authorship" and "how writers negotiate the related demands for creative autonomy and authoritative sanction." The dream vision is a form "generated by the poet's search for but failure to…
Moi, Toril.
David Aers, ed. Medieval Literature (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1986), pp. 11-33.
Reviews controversy (important in TC studies) on courtly love in Robertson, Donaldson, and Benton; naive "reflectionism" is attacked by Marxist theorists. In "De amore," desire is a hermeneutical challenge: "God for Andreas, like death for Lacan,…
Murphy, Michael.
Mediaevalia 9 (1986, for 1983): 205-23.
Argues that if we read CT aloud we should generally do so in our own dialects rather than in "Semblance," the reconstructed version of the fourteenth-century English dialect of the Southeast Midlands.
Njoku, Benedict C.
Thomas Halton, ed., and Joseph P. Williman, ed. and pref. Diakonia: Studies in Honor of Robert T. Meyer (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1986), pp. 302-307.
Derivations of words in Chaucer referring to saintliness and morality.
Although technically a "second edition," Payne's "Geoffrey Chaucer" is essentially a new book, having little in common with the first Twayne Chaucer, written by Edwin J. Howard and published in 1964. Payne's seven chapters treat Chaucer's life,…
Pearsall, Derek.
David Aers, ed. Medieval Literature (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1986), pp. 123-47.
Studies the hermeneutical "reflection of contemporary historical actuality" in Chaucer criticism. Although various critical schools--epistemologists, phenomenologists,Marxists and Russian Formalists (Medvedev, Bakhtin), etc.--recognize the…
Reiss, Edmund.
Leigh A. Arrathoon, ed. Chaucer and the Craft of Fiction (Rochester, Mich.: Solaris Press, 1986), pp. 97-119.
Chaucer's ludic use of language reflects the contemporary attitude toward "translatio" (the transformation of meaning and content and the creation of ambiguity) and the emphasis in logic and grammar on the limitations and inadequacy of language and…
Schibanoff, Susan.
Elizabeth A. Flynn and Patrocinio P. Schweickart, eds. Gender and Reading: Essays on Readers, Texts, and Contexts (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), pp. 83-106. Reprinted in Ruth Evans and Lesley Johnson, eds. Feminist Readings in Middle English Literature (Routledge, 1994), pp. 221-45.
Discusses the "well-established 'topos' of manuscript literature that women readers alone are offended by antifeminist texts" and examines Chaucer's defense of himself in portraying Criseyde's guilt. Asserts that Chaucer's Wife of Bath, being…
Shutt, Timothy Baker.
Dissertation Abstracts International 46 (1986): 1937A.
To Chaucer, Dante, Henryson, and Milton, the heavens were a celestial text, and movers of the spheres governed earthly affairs. Astral configurations allegorized to serve theological ends show the poets using accepted interpretations.
Strohm, Paul.
Piero Boitani and Jill Mann, eds. The Cambridge Chaucer Companion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 1-18.
Discusses the hierarchical but interdependent social structure of fourteenth-century England, Chaucer's social position and civil career, fourteenth-century literacy, and the "immediate circle" to whom Chaucer's works may be addressed.
Szittya, Penn R.
Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986.
Hostile propositions about the friars ("antifraternalism") in polemical tracts, works of theology, and literary fictions belong to a common literary tradition that began with the polemics against the friars of William of Saint Amour, with arguments…
Vance, Eugene.
Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986.
That "the major thread of coherence in medieval culture was its sustained reflection...upon language as a semiotic system--more broadly, upon the nature, the functions and the limitations of the verbal sign as a mediator of human understanding" is…
Wasserman, Julian N., and Robert J. Blanch, eds.
Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1986.
A collection of essays from the conference "Chaucer at Albany II" places Chaucer's works in both medieval and modern contexts. Some essays apply contemporary critical theories, e.g., Harold Bloom on the anxiety of influence, while others reinterpret…
Wenzel, Siegfried.
Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986.
Explores the relationship between the lyric and late-medieval preaching, the sermon context, Latin manuscripts of sermons,the Latin hymn tradition, Friar John de Grimestone, preaching verse styles, oral traditions, and homiletic use of verse, with…
Collects essays by Woolf published over a period of thirty years. For two essays that pertain to Chaucer, search for Art and Doctrine under Alternative Title.
