Browse Items (16381 total)

The tale of Custance is related to medieval lives of sainted women but is opposed to them in its concentration on the secular relations of an ordinary woman. Through this tale, the Man of Law seeks to reconcile the conflicting claims of the divine…

By exploring the uses of Latin quotations in the works of Langland and Chaucer, Furrow indicates late-Middle English readers' facility with Latin.

Setting out to establish what medieval readers thought about romances and what they labeled romances, Furrow concentrates on a wide range of romances from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries. Her discussion of romance and truth includes analysis…

Clarifies medieval understanding of the romance genre by exploring medieval catalogs of romances and applying George Lakoff's theory of "radial" categories. Includes comments on several of Chaucer's works and on several medieval lists that do not…

Twenty-seven articles on Chaucer, Langland, Malory, and others. For fourteen essays that pertain to Chaucer, search for Pilgrimage Through Medieval Literature under Alternative Title.

Argues that "Chaucer--drawing on a long tradition of Biblical commentary--is well aware of the sexual dimensions of word choice, even of the double meaning of 'man'." He "plays on the relationship between naming and sexual differentiation";explores…

Alexander Pope wrote a youthful imitation of HF Book 3, entitled the Temple of Fame. Pope's imitation of Chaucer and his reworking of that imitation in the Dunciad show he had assimilated Chaucer's troubling thoughts about the centrality and…

Ovid's views on humanity's decline from the first age influence Chaucer's "Former Age": Chaucer's use of Lamech in WBT, SqT, and Anel; and his distrust of rhetorical ornament (as evidenced by the Franklin and BD, for example).

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…

Arveragus is a more fully developed character if we acknowledge his relatively low degree (compared with that of Dorigen). Class status also clarifies the teller's own status and his admiration for rhetoric.

"Cloude," the word that ends the narrator's description of his celestial journey, calls attention to the diminished vision of Geffrey compared to that of Boethius's Thought, and the blurred understandings and dream categories offered in HF. The word…

In TC, especially bks. 2 and 4, Chaucer selected and reconstituted details from Dante and the classics for ironic purposes, treating sources as "history." Appendix: Petrarch's annotations to "Aeneid."

Just as TC is "distanced" from the reader by its setting during the Trojan War, so too does Pandarus blur the lines between reality and fiction. The "real" world is an illusion; the little world of the lovers is all that is real. Ironically,…

Unlike Ovid and Dante, who speak for fate and the universal order, Chaucer and Ovid speak for "the comic pathos of human frailty and human pretensions." The central concern of Chaucer's HF, BD, PF, LGW, TC, KnT, and NPT is with the attempt, and…

The narrator of BD, who sees in the tale of Ceyx and Alcyone an exemplum of the loss of their "golden age" love, realizes that the love of the knight is an analogue of the happy fulfillment of the couple's love. Thus, the actual consolation of the…

Medieval commentaries on the confusion of language introduced through the Tower of Babel (Genesis 10-11) illuminate the motif of linguistic disintegration that runs through SNT, CYT, and ManT. The associations of Nimrod with pride, magic, fire, and…

MLT and PrT "recoil from the otherness of Islam and of medieval Jewry," but SqT treats the Mongols with "toleration and an engaged sympathy." The xenophobia of the first two "Tales" indicates that they should be read ironically; SqT is Chaucer's…

Despite Chaucer's early borrowings from Froissart, the two poets diverged as their careers developed. Contrasts the "Voyage en Bearn" section of Froissart's "Chroniques" with SqT and FranT, arguing that Froissart is "in some respects even more…

Following an exposition of received biblical history and medieval commentaries in which the Fall and Babel represent declensions from unity and clarity, Fyler addresses Jean's Roman, Dante's Commedia, HF, SNT, and CYT intertextually and in the…

Describes Ovid's response to Virgil, and gauges Ovid's influence on Chaucer, focusing on the latter's acquaintance with "Ars Amatoria," "Remedia Amoris," and "Amores," and on the "self-conscious, obtrusive narrator." Like Ovid, and unlike Virgil,…

Examines plot and language repetition and "doublings" in CT. Focuses on irony and ambiguity in Th-MelL and claims that both tales have an "identical sentence" and are "the same story told twice. Also discusses MkT, NPT, and PrT.

Argues that the narrator in MerT "augments the malignity of the tale itself by debunking all idealism and mocking its naiveté, but in his blindness and rhetorical ineptitude points to a sordid reality that he fails to gloss over." Yet, the tale…

Comments on a wide variety of examples--comic and/or serious--of boundaries and sutures between languages in the late medieval literature, exploring issues of translation, including biblical translation; perceived contrasts between "supposedly fixed…

Facsimile reproduction of Greaves' grammar (1594), which was the second grammar of English to be printed; includes as an appendix a six-page "Vocabula Chauceriana," the first glossary of Chaucer's lexicon.

Explores the "double-contextual development" of characters and their actions in beast tales and beast fables, investigating double meanings (animal and human) in such narratives. Includes discussion of how NPT follows the Renart tradition in this…