The anti-Robertsonian introduction (pp. 1-7) rejects "systems of codes." If Chaucer had been writing in modern times, he would have written "The TV Evangelist's Tale." Chaucer's Pardoner is "obscenely formidable and a laughable charlatan."
Chaucer's Pardoner owes a debt to Jean de Meun's Fals-Semblant ("Roman de la Rose"), whose false-seeming depends on clothing. In PardT, clothing metaphors become symbols for the relationship between body and soul. The Pardoner's reliance on 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…
Harwood, Britton J.
Philological Quarterly 67 (1988): 409-22.
Chaucer's Pardoner is the ultimate "confidence man," a mask layered over the persona of the character and the authorial voice. Yet, his very distance from the other pilgrims provides him a kind of opennes. For purposes of contrast, and to emphasize…
The Pardoner's 100 marks (PardP 390) correspond strikingly to the amount stipulated by Lady Clare, Elizabeth de Burgh (grandmother to the wife of young Geoffrey Chaucer's lord, Prince Lionel) to have prayers and good works performed for her soul and…
Finlayson, John.
Studia Neophilologica 60 (1988): 171-74.
The unmistakably sexual connotations of the source passages in "The Romance of the Rose" for the table manners and motto of Chaucer's Prioress help confirm "the impression that there 'is' a deliberate tension directed between the ideal of spiritual…
Mertens-Fonck, Paule.
Bulletin des Anglicistes Medievistes 34 (1988): 514-22.
Mertens-Fonck returns to the clerk-knight debate tradition, especially to "Hueline et Aiglantine" and the "Concile de Remiremont," finding a source of the portrait of the Prioress.
Ando, Shinsuke.
Piero Boitani and Anna Torti, eds. Genres, Themes, and Images in English Literature from the Fourteenth to the Fifteenth Century (Tubingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1988), pp. 31-39.
Examines words and phrases in Th to reveal "hidden elements of satire and parody," which are intensified by Chaucer's masterful and paradoxical handling of the author in the text. The language of satire and parody defies translation.
Unlike other recent critics, who have viewed Mel as a "treatise," Kempton sees it as a "tale" with dramatic personages. It is meant not to enforce one didactic point but to teach us to give up the search for authority and to enjoy the play of…
Chaucer's MkT and "Le Chevalier de la charrette" illustrate variations on the character Ugolino from Dante's "Inferno." Chaucer manipulates Dante's story to emphasize the Monk's exemplum: the fall of a a great man beset by adverse fortune.
DiMarco, Vincent.
English Language Notes 25:4 (1988): 15-19.
Behind the mysterious "vitremyte" that Zenobia is forced to adopt in MkT 2372 lies the Maeonian mitra, a cloth cap worn by Greek women. As a symbol of effeminacy, it is used in Boccaccio, for example, in the humiliation of Hercules. In Zenobia's…
Grennen, Joseph E.
Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 82 (1988): 337-40.
Taking "olde thyngs" (GP 175, Monk's sketch) as a scribal corruption or emendation of the unattested "alder-thynge" eliminates problems of syntax, semantics, and meaning.
Peters, F. J. J.
Studia Neophilologica 60 (1988): 167-70.
Though the dating of NPT to thirty-two days "syn March bigan" is generally emended to bring the tale date to May 3, the unemended text makes literal sense if treated as a reference to "frame story time." The dating thus "should be read in two…
Piper, William Bowman.
Texas Studies in Literature and Language 30 (1988): 478-95.
Comparison of Chaucer's NPT with Dryden's version reveals that Chaucer focused on individual human action while Dryden approached the tale through satire of human social conditions. The "human immediacy" of Chaucer's tale may be its outstanding…
Reed, Thomas L.,Jr.
Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 89 (1988): 44-56.
The fall of Nebuchadnezzar is the only history in MkT that ends favorably for its protagonist; in its tragicomic structure and its transformation of the hero to a birdlike beast, this episode anticipates some main features of NPT.
Pertelote's quotation from Cato ("Ne do no fors of dremes"--NPT 2941) is from distich 2.31, which specifically denies the significance of a type of dream that is different from Chauntecler's dream. The cock's attack on the "auctorite" of Cato thus…
Travis, Peter W.
Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 18 (1988): 195-220.
In its use of unarticulated sounds, nonce words, models of grammatical meaning, and logical propositions and contradictions, as well as its specific historical circumstances, NPT draws on the most familiar and elementary of cultural structures,…
Saito, Isamu.
Studies in Medieval Language and Literature (Tokyo) 3 (1988): 1-24.
Looking at sources, Saito explores Chaucer's delicate use of "bisynesse," arguing that the Second Nun faithfully translates and tells the legend of Saint Cecilia according to her own "business."
