Browse Items (16381 total)

Argues for using "a Bernardine anagogical lens" to assess theological depth in CT and "Piers Plowman," and traces allusions and references to Bernard of Clairvaux in "Piers," ParsT, and the "Prick of Conscience.."

Considers the addition of medical terminology to the lexicons of medieval laypeople, with particular regard to its use in metaphor. Authors under consideration include Chaucer, Henryson, Rolle, and Kempe.

Examines treatment of several CT narrators and characters and sees examples of "othering" and hostile prejudice toward those characters. Proceeds from there to possible continuations of those prejudices in contemporary readings.

Argues that Chaucer "contextualizes virtues through narrative." Provides close study of Chaucer's treatment of virtues and ethics in CT and TC.

Examines "the semantics and pragmatics of nouns that denote gender and social status in Chaucer's literature, e.g., "knyght," "lady," "leche," "wyf '," focusing on MerT, FranT, ABC, and TC, but addressing most of Chaucer's works.

Examines answers to prayer in BD, HF, KnT, FranT, "hagiographic tales" (SNT, PrT, MLT, and ClT), and TC, arguing that Chaucer engages significant "theological and philosophical issues."

Argues that "by subverting traditional literary genres, and inventing new ones, Chaucer provided alternative life-views," reframing traditional views of eroticism in CT (KnT, MilT, RvT, WBPT, PhyT, ShT) and TC.

Considers joy to be the "climactic centre" of TC, addressing the presence and forms of joy "in the poem's construction of language, themes, and characters" and assessing "whether joy, in medieval culture, is a physical emotion, an affective state, a…

Includes commentary on the "figure of Pluto" in MerT.

Considers Chaucer as part of a larger discussion of medieval ideas of the physical damage that accrued from travel, both in the sense of a literal pilgrimage and in tropes including the "wandering heart."

Studies the portrayals of alchemy and alchemists in fourteenth-and fifteenth-century English verse, including discussion of Chaucer's negative depiction of alchemy and its practitioners in CYPT, and John Gower's positive view in "Confessio Amantis."

Argues from linguistic evidence that Pratt is wrong when hypothesizing that Chaucer used a French version of the Troy story.

Argues that Chaucer's texts engage translation as a political tool. Rom indicates a balance of resistance to France and outreach to its cultural products; Bo can be read as suspicious of royal power during the late Ricardian period; and ClT…

Asserting the impossibility of a neutral approach and citing her Jewish ancestry, Paley considers PrT in its historical context.

Studies the "sociology of evil," organizing the discussion by the traditional Seven Deadly Sins and exploring social, psychological, historical, legal, and political concepts of evil. The section on pride includes "A Medieval Excursus: Chaucer's…

Item not seen; described in an online review by Joy Calderwood (http://www.reviewers-choice.com/the_insomniac_tales.htm) as thirteen "Chick Lit" short stories by various women writers in imitation of CT.

An erotic prose poem that combines a pastiche of Chaucerian quotations, faux Middle English, and a narrative of sexual activity that alludes recurrently to NPT.

Analyzes the rhetorical shift between the third-person presentational voice of the first eighteen lines of GP and the following first-person voice of the involved narrator. The passage exploits a new paradigm of narration and validates the theories…

Examines the word "red," its connotations, and the evolution of related color words such as "crimson" and "peach" from Old English through 1900, focusing on Shakespeare and Chaucer.

Examines how Stephen Hawes's "Conforte de Louers" and "Pastime of Pleasure," in selected allusions and references to TC, conflate the poet's identity and the act of reading. Reactions to the Hawesean poems in Humphrey emanuscript collection suggest…

Affiliates the success, succession, and monumentalization of Chaucer in fifteenth-century literature with Lancastrian ascendancy and status, quoting and analyzing excerpts from Hoccleve, Lydgate, and Caxton.

Seeks to "account for constraints governing Chaucer's syntactic inversions with a purpose to uncover Chaucer's underlying metrical principles," employing a combination of "optimality theory" and "Maxent Grammars" and analyzing "every tenth line" of…

Argues that the Plague, or Black Death, "stands behind" BD, helping to "give it a shape and a meaning," describing late-medieval attitudes toward death and fortune as described in commentaries on plague.

In the Middle Ages the term "art" meant the liberal arts or almost any serious endeavor (other than the visual arts), also involving Gregory the Great's dictum that "the art of arts is the rule of souls." Chaucer was less influenced by the visual…

Although Chaucer was not a "painterly" poet, he was, like most other serious writers of the time, an iconographic poet. Examines a number of medieval images appropriate to Chaucer's life of Saint Cecilia and includes twenty reproductions in black…