Browse Items (16382 total)

Introduction to TC designed for students. Provides scene-by-scene themes, key topics, and commentary, with recurrent attention to Chaucer's debt to Boccaccio's "Il filostrato."

Explores the meaning of Middle English "fama," derived from the Latin, in relation to the spoken word. Chapter 15, "Chaucer's 'House of Fame' and Pope's 'Temple of Fame'," analyzes relations between the spoken and written word in these poems, as well…

Analyzes the Parson's use of "myrie" in ParsP in terms of the "internal generic matrix" constructed by the Parson in the ParsT. Focuses on Tzvetan Todorov's and Paul Strohm's writings on genre.

Argues that SNT "presents conversion as a choice stimulated by apprehension of the divine through the senses" and accomplished by a "radical act of the will, unmediated and immediate, if not inherently violent."

Comments on Umberto Eco's, Jacques Derrida's, and Marianne Dekoven's contributions to animal studies, and assesses the Host's references to "jade" and "trede-fowl" in NPP and NPE as "prime examples" of the "human habit of appropriating the animal…

Applies understanding of literary texts, including Chaucer's CT, to ideas of everyday life. Chapter 1, "Chaucer: Ambiguity and Ethics," addresses the benefits of using NPT, in particular, to teach ethics and issues of morality.

Discusses biblical kings represented in the "camera depicta" of the Westminster Chamber, also treated in several literary works on kingship, including MkT and a short passage in ParsT. The Chamber's murals proclaim the Plantagenet kings to be "ideal…

The semantic range of "proverbs," and Chaucer's emphasis on the word, indicates that Mel is a series of parables, or allegorical narratives.

Posits the centrality of the Pardoner (rather than the marginality assumed by many critics) to CT. The "confidence game" of his narration parallels Chaucer's own rhetorical approach and informs those of his critics. Chaucer illustrates the…

Viewed in light of Jean Baudrillard's "Simulacra and Simulation," the Pardoner's relics are simulacra, which allows Chaucer to question their "realness." The textuality of PardT (and CT as a whole) is to be read as a hyperreality.

Discusses Wordsworth's modernization of ManT, which was commissioned for Thomas Powell's "The Poems of Geoffrey Chaucer Moderniz'd" (1841) but eventually suppressed by Wordsworth's wife.

Unlike their biblical source, Chaucer's and Gower's allusions to Jephthah's daughter indicate concern with pain and emotional suffering. Also considers the illustration in Pierpont Morgan Library, MS M.126 that accompanies Gower's tale of Virginia in…

Argues that PhyT not only addresses changes in the medieval social power structure, but also serves as a "critique of masculine power" within the medieval European court system.

The already diffuse mixture of accepted sources for FranT is complemented here with an argument favoring a debt to French fabliaux.

Offers Richard de Fournival's "Consaus d'amours," a thirteenth-century French "art d'aimer" (art of love), as a possible source for FranT.

Interrogates post-Enlightenment understandings of shame, and argues that in FranT shame negotiates continua rather than dichotomies (men/women, courtly love/marriage, and public/private). Read in light of conduct literature, Arveragus's claims and…

Argues that genre and the discourses of desire in MerT prove too strong for the narrator, who is constantly conflicted about his presentation not only of linguistic and narrative desires but also of the psychoanalytic displacements of these desires.

Presents a version of the Griselda story from Thomas III, Marquis of Saluzzo (c. 1355-1416) in "Le chevalier errant," and analyzes how fourteenth-century audiences would have reacted to Chaucer's version in ClT. Includes a translation of Thomas's…

References to animals presented as "sentient beings" in SumT convey the friar's "spiritual weakness," perhaps reflecting oral traditions of Franciscan ideals.

The language and imagery of demonic temptation versus human free will connect FrT and SumT and gain dimension by comparison with ClT. Thomas of SumT is called "demonyak," but his scatological riposte to the friar is justified anger.

Two Anglo-Latin "celibacy poems" use "quoniam" to mean the same thing that it means in WBP, prompting the question, might a "joke have been circulating among thirteenth and fourteenth century clerics, that every "quare" has its 'quoniam'?"

Compares the resolutions of conflict in WBT and Gower's "Tale of Florent" and explores their methods of characterization. While Chaucer depicts characters through dialogue, argument, debate, and negotiation with other persons, Gower's characters…

Explores Chaucer's strategy of satire in WBPT, arguing that in its concern with interpretation and discursive insensibility it is fundamentally similar to the anti-mercantile satire of MerT, ShT, and MLT. Reads the Wife in "a London context,"…

Explores relations between concepts of selfhood and notions of spiritual and, especially, secular vocation in WBT, Langland's "Piers Plowman," and Gower's "Vox clamantis." The "wide scope" of late medieval applications of the Pauline notion of being…

"Arthur and Gorlagon" and WBPT share numerous misogynist topoi as well as the plot element of a mission to understand women. The Latin romance is thus "a more significant analogue for the combined Prologue and Tale . . . than has been recognized."