Browse Items (16381 total)

MilT serves as a corrective to KnT (where chaos in effect breaks down order) by exceeding the typical symmetry of the fabliau (a genre in which order properly has no part). Departing from the "pryvete" set up in its many senses, MilT develops and…

Medical and psychological insights confirm alcoholism as the Pardoner's root problem. Heavy long-term indulgence has left him unable to function without drink; he is alienated, impotent, resentful, and eloquent in preaching yet mute under attack. …

Alisoun presents a puzzle without a key because she is unreal,created out of an imaginary book derived from real male clerical authorities but eventually destroyed. Alisoun and her self-projection--the hag-bride--represent not women who can answer…

CT Fragment VII illustrates and undercuts the Aristotelian causes of literature. Thus, ShT demonstrates the near efficient cause, the teller; PrT, the remote cause, God. Chaucer-the-Pilgrim, the final cause, separates delight and instruction in Th…

Although earlier Christian comment (especially Augustine's) blames Lucrece for being motivated by love of reputation, English chroniclers and the "classicizing" friars variously reworked her story. The views of Ridevall and Higden, reasserting…

With its richness subverting fabliau conventions, MilT glitters with multiple significations. Alison, the central figure, is both sexy and presexual, both Medusa and "bryd" (in multiple and homonymous senses). Unlike the traditional old cuckold,…

Spenser's account of Melibee in "The Faerie Queene" 6 reveals affinities with Chaucer's Mel, as well as significant differences from it.

"Former Age" emphasizes not so much former innocence as prelapsarian lack of technical knowledge. Though the speaker takes his stance between the first age and the present, he employs ironic diction, aligning himself with the latter. Besides…

Gower's "Confessio Amantis" presents Genius's tales as morally simple, although the incest stories stimulate readers to ask moral questions. In MLT, Chaucer represents his narrator as misreading Gower, affecting a simplistically moral stance and…

Reader-response analysis of various dramatic monologues. Shaw focuses on the dramatic monologues of Robert Browning and other Victorians but clarifies the functions of deception, self-deception, casuistry, irony, double irony, and Sartre's concept of…

Caxton's grouping of the Nine Worthies influenced later English perceptions of nationhood and history. Includes brief mention of MkT, and several notes pertain to Chaucer.

Discusses what naturalism is and how it links a set of normative intuitions about gender and desire to a broader theory of what it means for humans to be a law to themselves. Central to MilT is Alisoun, the "single most compelling instance of a…

The medieval chivalric practice of ransom illuminates the preoccupation with double sense, surrogacy, and substitutions in TC. Working with the poem's depiction of character, its narrative structure, and its insistently metaphoric language, the…

Discusses John Stow's 1561 edition of Chaucer's works, in which Stow includes Lydgate's "Siege of Thebes" to expand Chaucer's canon. The inclusion helped shape the idea of Chaucer in the Renaissance, with far-reaching consequences for subsequent…

Argues that the Frontispiece of the 1420 manuscript of TC (Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 61) demonstrates a medieval tradition of textuality that is not only oral and aural but social, and an example of group textuality in which words and…

Focuses on how Chaucer influenced the writings of Cotton Mather, Anne Bradstreet, and Nathaniel Ward in seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century New England.

Argues that SqT is an exception among medieval romances because it investigates things that are not what they seem. The first section of the tale scrutinizes the mechanics of marvels and wonder; the second explores the mechanics of stories,…

Analyzes Edmund Spenser's "The Ruines of Time" as a response to TC, arguing that Spenser emulates aspects of TC as a mediation of "the humanist imitation of classical texts" and concludes that the Renaissance "rediscovery of classical texts was…

Contends that the confrontation between the carpenter John and the clerk Nicholas in MilT provides dramatic context for the exploration of anti-intellectualism and intellectual curiosity. Claims that in MilT it is the "combination of humor and…

Introduces four previously unknown documents, including a Chaucer life record connected to his guardianship of Michael Staplegate, which offer new perspectives on Chaucer's life and poetry. Implies that Chaucer's wardship of Staplegate extended as…

Studies Ovid's "Tristia" and LGW and argues that "Ovid's literary autobiography" revealed in the "Tristia" is "assimilated and elaborated" by Chaucer in LGWP. This connection not only allows Chaucer "to convey . . . a sense of his own Ricardian,…

Argues that, rooted in "medieval theory of mediated perception" and concerned with perceptual distortion, HF shows how a "sensing body" participates in an "ambient mediascape"--one that includes environmental media (air, water, architecture) as well…

Evaluates Chaucer's strategies of adapting his Italian sources in ClT. He uses three paratexts to adjust the original story to the specific narratological and structural microcosm of CT: ClP, the conclusion explaining what Petrarch meant in…

All of the recensions of the Prologue to "Confessio Amantis"--especially the Ricardian recension--reflect Gower's economic concerns. His Tale of Florent also engages commercial concerns, particularly those of marital contracts, although to a lesser…

Nicholson asserts that critics' "willingness to detect irony at every turn" is appropriate in Chaucer studies, but not in Gower studies, arguing that paradox is a recurrent and sustained mode of thought and expression in Gower's "Confessio." Surveys…