Browse Items (16381 total)

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…

Legal proceedings following the 1390 roadside theft from Chaucer while he was on the King's business demonstrate the folly of any medieval challenge to hierarchical prerogative by a gang representing antihierarchical attitudes. Theoretically…

Feature-length film that includes a fictionalized version of Geoffrey Chaucer (played by Paul Bettany) who serves as herald to a would-be knight, William Thatcher (Heath Ledger). Released on DVD by Columbia Tristar.

Presents evidence that Juan Manuel's "El Conde Lucanor" 50 is an analogue to WBT, focusing primarily on their parallel structures as exempla.

Demonstrates the plain prose style of John Wyclif's sermons by comparing and contrasting five sample sermons with passages of similar length from ParsT and the "Cloud of Unknowing," considering sentence length, complexity, and clausal construction;…

Provides historical evidence that females practiced medicine in medieval Europe, identifying several examples of their experience and tribulations, and presenting them as background to Chaucer's "Trotula" (WBP 3.677).

Defines the private and social aspects of "honor" in Chaucer's works, exploring its relations with related concepts such as "worth," "worship," shame, gentility, heritability, and, for women, chastity. Focuses on TC and FranT, but comments on these…

El is based on Hg, the first published text. Hg arranged the thirteen apparently unrelated fragments of the one copytext left by Chaucer not by geographical and chronological features which exercise modern critics but by a sequence of…

Chaucer's power lies particularly in the way he adapted and altered his sources and mirrored the world around him.

Accounts of love from chronicles and letters show that historical love in the Middle Ages was as rich, varied, and earthy as even Chaucer could imagine.

Examines depictions of masculine attractiveness in medieval romances, including TC. Influenced by rhetorical and courtly traditions, such depictions (and parallel cautions against seduction) emphasize moral and social qualities rather than personal…

The eagle in HF, pt. 2, with its immediate source in Dante's "Purgatorio," also parallels a passage in the "De vulgari eloquentia" (2.4) that cautions poets not to follow the "astripetam aquilam" ("star-seeking eagle"). The eagle is a parody of the…

Suggests that analysis of the physical makeup of manuscripts is a way to understand the production and use of Middle English texts. Focuses on the multilingualism in texts, the different functions of texts in a single book, and scribal output.…

Studies the reception of the Ellesmere manuscript of CT and its use by scholars, concluding that the manuscript is remarkable not only for the poem it records but also for the part it plays in development of modern ideas about the author.

Reported by MLA International Bibliography; essay not seen.

Deals with the Latin translation of TC 2 by Sir Francis Kynaston.

Examines various uses and stylistic effects of "and" in HF.

Surveys theories of Criseyde's betrayal in TC; maintains that her depravity results in Pandarus's deliberate actions and Troilus's passion, along with her own weaknesses; and emphasizes Chaucer's characterization of Criseyde as a complex woman.

Examines the words "drinke" (TC 2.651), "dwale" (RvT 4161), "pervynke" (Rom 1432), and "herber" (TC 2.1705) and passages in CYT, NPT, KnT, and MerT, maintaining that Chaucer displays ample knowledge of medieval herbal lore.

Explores why Chaucer made the Wife of Bath an ideal wife after she became physically "somdel deef," tracing the meaning and effect of "deef" in the context of her revolt against the antifeminist tradition. In Japanese.

Surveys the repetitive use and meaning of "this miller," "hooly," "lo," and "game" in RvT.

Chaucer draws on the medical and literary traditions about poison current in his day. In KnT, Arcite's love for Emelye is pictured as a deadly infection.

The Wife of Bath is, in B. J. Whiting's phrase, "an oxymoron in the flesh," and modern structuralist criticism helps us to see the mythic implications of her parodies of Paul's dicta concerning marriage, apostolic experience, and beatific vision.

Interprets details of FrT in light of contemporaneous social commentaries to clarify nuances of irony, sarcasm, and criticism of the Summoner.

Identifies ways that word-play, echoic details, and thematic patterning contribute to the "dramatic" irony in SumT whereby the friar's hypocritical glossing is revealed and insulted without overt glossing by the narrator.