Identifies physiognomic details in NPP and NPE that characterize the Nun's Priest as a "healthy and handsome young cleric, of temperate disposition." He "has the virtues of the widow" of NPT- (good health and moral rectitude) which counterpoint the…
Observes that the "primary fiction" of CT is the narrator's "remembered personal experience," established in the GP and providing "the principle of form" for the entire work: a "pervasive sense of obsolescence, the passing of experience into memory."…
Explores the complementary relations between two "fantasies" about women that underlie Chaucer's Marriage Group: clerkly abuse rooted in patristic tradition (particularly Jerome) and courtly idealization rooted in "fin amour" (especially Jean de…
Identifies in KnT a "series of metamorphoses that expose the dehumanizing force of Venerian love," arguing that Chaucer converted Boccaccio's "random collection" of animal images into a "formal pattern" and obliquely affirmed the Boethian notion that…
Describes various features of Thomas Becket's shrine at Canterbury as recorded in Erasmus's satiric "Peregrinatio Religionis Ergo," focusing on its account of Becket's "hair breeches" and suggesting that this relic underlies the Host's…
Argues that PhyT was designed to critique the Man of Law, an extension of the ancient "feud between law and medicine." Explores this tradition in classical and medieval sources, and identifies ways that Chaucer evoked it through adjustments to Livy…
Examines the "psychological realities" of Troilus's fear of losing Criseyde after she departs from Troy, comparing Chaucer's and Boccaccio's versions to show how, in TC, the hero's "immoderate fear distorts perception" and causes him to judge…
The Pardoner's interruption of the WBP causes shifts in her tone and subject, but also alerts us to parallels between the two characters: wide travels, sermon-like autobiographical prologues, and tales which feature central characters who are…
NPT is indebted to the naturalistic and mock-heroic tone of the French "Roman de Renard," as well as to an indigenous English tradition of didactic beast fables and exempla. The Priest's concluding exhortation on humility marks the point of the…
The vivid association of the dramatic action of TC with its physical settings reflects a medieval rhetorical technique whereby architectural images ("loci") were employed as aids to organization and memory. The perception of the significance of…
As narrator Chaucer partakes heartily in the general mood of each book of TC. The detached coldness of the poem's apocalyptic ending suggests divine omniscience, making the reader acutely aware of the difference between his perception of the mutable…
Medieval manuals of preaching demand that the good preacher be a good man, yet the Pardoner's sermon is very effective. CT is an investigation of the possibility of reaching some compromise between the preaching methods of the evil, but eloquent,…
Both Chaucer and Gower expressed the sentiment that the world had grown old and cast the passing of time in moral terms. But they also ultimately relied on personal sensibilty to render the feeling or experience of time passing because they were not…
In BD, Chaucer, working in a tradition of courtly style, composes a poem of consolation. Within a beautiful poem of human sympathy, Chaucer effects a critique of courtly language and exposes the inability of such language to express profound…
The form of GP is descended from the genre of the rhetorical catalogue of types, represented in simpler form by the lists of trees and birds in PF. In PF, the garden represents the world of timeless values and the catalogs the earth-bound realities;…
ShT contains within itself the opposing standards contrasted in KnT, MilT and RvT. The voice of ShT is more nearly Chaucer's own than in any of the more dramatically employed fabliaux.
TC is a thoroughly Christian poem in which characters of a pagan past bring about through their actions the contrary of their expectations, whereas the narrator achieves his purpose exactly, despite his seemingly varied tones. Thus the palinode…
The narrator of TC, never overtly separated from the author, implicates and disorients the reader by inconsistencies, variations in person and syntax, seeming self-identification now with Troilus's naivete and now with Pandarus's deviousness,…
With the Host as a master of revels who cannot coerce the lower orders, CT develops wide audience appeal through the pilgrims as players in a medieval festival atmosphere, where both "gentils" and "churls" participate, often with role reversals and…
ManP and ManT reveal, through Lacanian insights, Chaucer's position as court poet. The Manciple's silencing of the Cook prefigures the tale in which the regal Phebus, who cages both his free-spirited wife and the truth-telling crow, kills and…
Despite totally different tone and purpose, Chaucer's LGWP parallels Dante's "Purgatorio" significantly: both poets present their narrators as undergoing penance; both Alceste and Beatrice, allegorically garbed and attended, serve as spiritual…
Romance typically treats ambiguous doubles, threatened incest,and the unfallen world. Though SqT fits both genre and teller, it devalues the marvelous (e.g., the dry tree) and transmutes its components (analogously to but differently from CYT). The…
Most of the objects and language associated with the Pardoner mirror his fragmentation of incompleteness. Significantly, the literary background in the "Roman de la Rose" follows the account of the castration of Saturn and Raison's defense of plain…
WBP and WBT appear within frameworks of CT in which masculine values of truth and authority are already evaporating. In phallocentric discourse, women's talk is assumed to be untrue, and male desire is the central secret. Alison reveals throughout…
The rare pre-Chaucerian fabliaux in English display affinities with exempla, drama, and inverted romance. Critics have long pondered why no fabliau tradition in English exists; they hypothesize scribal prudery or loss of many texts. Considering the…
