Browse Items (16381 total)

Summary-survey of critical responses to GP. Six chapters focus on particular time periods and the critical emphases that dominated them: (1) 1368-1880, Chaucer's "greatness" and the early editorial tradition; (2) 1892-1949, later editors and…

After examining weather patterns during the Middle Ages, suggests that the late fourteenth century experienced lower than normal temperatures and increased precipitation that would have affected harvests. Since inclement weather plays a role in BD,…

In SumT, exchanges between the friar and the lord of the manor illuminate the friar's bourgeois relationship with Thomas. When Thomas "pays" the friar with a fart, and the friar appeals to the social hierarchy represented by the feudal lord of the…

Focusing on such critics as Thomas Lounsbury, E. Talbot Donaldson, D. W. Robertson, John Fleming, and Derek Pearsall, Georgianna suggests that twentieth-century scholars, like their sixteenth-century predecessor John Foxe, have constructed a…

CT examines such religious practices as pilgrimage, pardon, and penance within medieval soteriological traditions, which often analyzed redemption in commercial language. Particularly in GP and PardT, "Chaucer's understanding of the terms of…

Griselda's assent to Walter's wishes, which goes beyond the patience or concealment that he demands, represents complete identification or unity of will. In the theological terms of Rudolph Otto, her assent is not "moral" but "numinous." The…

Examines the complexity of anticlericalism. Clerical figures are prominent in the works of both Boccaccio and Chaucer, but CT redirects the potential disruption of anticlerical complaint away from dissent and toward self-evaluation. Georgianna gives…

Proposes that Chaucer, Gower, Lydgate, and other contemporaries may have viewed Ovid's work not merely as a source of exempla, but as a rhetorical model for subversive stories.

Argues that the condensing and synthesizing of sources in MkT mirrors the way in which clerical commentary changed in the fourteenth century to accommodate new readers uneducated in monastic tradition.

Explores the political motivations of Ovid's "frame narratives" and how they appealed to and influenced medieval writers. For a chapter on Chaucer see Chapter 4, "Clerical Expansion and Narrative Diminution in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales."

Argues that the characterization of Pandarus in TC was influenced by the tradition of the comic servant in Greco-Roman New Comedy. In Hungarian.

The Clerk and his tale serve as a corrective to the Wife of Bath's philosophy by "exploiting a fictional and moral failure of nerve on the Wife's part," since it is not realism but weakness that motivates the Wife.

In plot and dominant ideas, PardT reflects the opposition between avarice and mercy common in the medieval vices-virtues tradition. The avaricious Pardoner lacks mercy, and the recurring notion of voluntary poverty in PardPT can be linked with mercy…

In a section on directness and indirectness in plotting, discusses Boccaccio and Chaucer works as antecedents to modern short-stories, contrasting the directness of "Decameron" 3.5 with the "indirect mode" of CT, particularly NPT (pp. 17-23).

A dictionary of themes and topics in medieval literature and their legacy in later literature, the visual arts, opera, etc. Mentions Chaucers references to Arthur, Aeneas, Troilus, and Gawain.

Examines how Chaucer manipulates the conventions of the "descriptio" in TC, arguing that he capitalizes on its metaliterary potential. Chaucer gives texture to the descriptio of Criseyde by spreading it throughout several portions of the narrative.…

Gertz assesses 1337-1580 as the period of transition between the Middle Ages and the Early Modern era. Dynastic ambition, science, exploration, and disasters provide contexts and stimuli for the literature. In their rhetorical dexterity and highly…

Gertz reads HF in light of modern semiotic theory (Maria Corti, Umberto Eco, and Roman Jakobson) and medieval traditions of "fürstenspiegel" (mirror of princes), with particular attention to visual signs and codes. Contrasts Chaucer's techniques of…

Proposes an influence of KnT 1.1995 ("dirke ymaginning") on Vaughan's "The importunate Fortune, written to Doctor 'Powel' of Cantre," and accounts for Vaughan's confusion of Mars and Saturn.

Each of the legends makes use of "the metonymic possibilities of objects and bodies" to represent the difficulty of discerning truth from fable in written sources available to the historiographer.

Study of extant manuscripts from fourteenth-century England reveals that Chaucer was familiar with Ovidian texts and commentaries of his time. He developed his own adaptation of tone and vocabulary, exploring the tension between courtly love and…

Explores the "tensions" between the narrator and "author-subject" of TC, assessing how (as in other medieval works) the author's "signature" is found within the narrative rather than in its paratext. Such embedded signatures are characteristic of…

Examines "the different use to which Chaucer and Boccaccio have put certain raw narrative material belonging to the tradition of popular comic literature" of their cultural heritage--i.e., Chaucer's use of sources in RvT as opposed to Boccaccio's in…

On Chaucer's Italian sources.

MilT, RvT, FrT, SumT, ShT, MerT can be called fabliaux if this term is taken in a typological, rather than strictly historical, acception. Their homogeneity is, however, only apparent. The six tales from CT are divided into three…