Green, Richard Firth.
Chaucer Review 13 (1979): 201-20.
Throughout TC Chaucer uses the social play of "luf-talkying" as a vehicle for irony and as a means of establishing man's inability to attain an ideal. Troilus plays the love game too earnestly and so is both truly comic and, in terms of final…
Green, Richard Firth.
Notes and Queries 238 (1993): 303-305.
Discusses GP 313-20 with particular reference to the meaning of "fee simple," suggesting that it implies sharp practice by the man of Law and that the portrayal of him is critical.
Green, Richard Firth.
English Language Notes 28:4 (1991): 9-12.
Discusses similarities between Chaucer's WBT and the French farce "Les deux maris et leurs deux femmes" and suggests that the loathly lady's riddle at the end of WBT "might be drawing on a less recherche tradition than that of Latin rhetoric."
Green, Richard Firth.
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 15 (1993): 131-45.
The breeches-kissing episode in PardT is analogous to fabliau narratives of the "Friar's Pants" in which a cuckolded husband is duped into believing that the cuckolder's pants are relics. Green adduces several versions of the account and suggests…
Green, Richard Firth.
A. J. Minnis, Charlotte C. Morse, and Thorlac Turville-Petre, eds. Essays on Ricardian Literature: In Honour of J. A. Burrow (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), pp. 179-202.
Documents the medieval legal understanding of "trouthe" as an aspect of personal "oathworthiness" rather than of verifiability of facts; argues that this early sense obtains in MLT 2.630 even though it was fast becoming an archaic sense.
Green, Richard Firth.
Helen Cooper and Sally Mapstone, eds. The Long Fifteenth Century: Essays for Douglas Gray (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), pp. 163-84.
Surveys ballad scholarship and argues that exploration of medieval ballads has value for broader study, suggesting, for example, that "King Henry" provides useful contexts for the gentility speech in WBT.
Green, Richard Firth.
Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999.
Explores patterns in the meanings and applications of two fundamental concepts in late-medieval English tradition: truth (trouthe), which shifted from "integrity" to "conforming to fact"; and treason, which shifted from "personal betrayal" to a…
Green, Richard Firth.
Emily Steiner and Candace Barrington, eds. The Letter of the Law: Legal Practice and Literary Production in Medieval England (New York: Cornell University Press, 2002), pp. 105-14.
Legal diction and references in KnT reflect concern in the 1380s with the growing influence of the Court of Chivalry and the revival of trial by battle.
Explores the semantic and cultural background of the word "elvysshe" as applied to alchemy in CYT (8.751, 8.842). Like elves, alchemists were secretive, elusive, liminal figures, distrusted and associated with transformation. Though modern editors…
Green, Richard Firth.
Mediaevalia 8 (1985 for 1982): 351-58.
The Pardoner is characterized not by signs of homosexuality, but by indication of effeminacy, thought in the Middle Ages to indicate carnality. Green offers parallels in works by Gower and Lydgate.
Green, Richard Firth.
Corinne Saunders, ed. A Concise Companion to Chaucer (Malden, Mass.; Oxford; and Victoria: Blackwell, 2006), pp. 199-217.
Green confronts "the interpretive function of morality in medieval literature" and discusses why Chaucer's "moral horizons" in CT are elusive. Many of the Tales include competing morals; frameworks such as estates satire and the seven deadly sins…
Bromyard's denunciation of "popular views on sex" in the Luxuria section of his "Summa Predicantium" resonates verbally and structurally with WBP, suggesting that the Wife's performance functions in part as a counterattack to such sermonizing by …
Green, Richard Firth.
Neophilologus 92 (2008): 351-58.
Chaucer's allusion to the legendary Welsh bard Glascurion in HF (line 1209) is paralleled by details that survive in the traditional ballad "Glasgerion," or "Glen Kindy." Echoes of the ballad tradition are also found in Gavin Douglas's "The Palice of…
Green, Richard Firth.
V. J. Scattergood and J. W. Sherborne, eds. English Court Culture in the Later Middle Ages (London: Duckworth, 1983), pp. 87-108.
Surveys evidence for the existence of "courts of love" in late medieval French and English culture, considering historical evidence such as Charles VI's "cour amoureuse," and the literary evidence of the love debate, the "demande d'amour," the flower…
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…
Green, Richard Firth.
Simon Horobin and Linne Mooney, eds. Middle English Texts in Transition: A Festschrift Dedicated to Toshiyuki Takamiya on His 70th Birthday (York: York Medieval Press, 2014), pp. 1-20.
Connects Chaucer's possible scribe Adam Pinkhurst to the London Scrivener's Guild. Provides historical background of Pinkhurst's connection with the guild.
Green, Richard Firth.
Robert S. Sturges, ed. Law and Sovereignty in the Middle Ages and Renaissance (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), pp. 261-85.
Reassesses the implications of the two copies of the quitclaim pertaining to Cecily Champain and Chaucer, clarifying the meaning of "quitclaim," describing the process of issuing claims in the medieval period, and arguing that Champain issued two…
Green, Richard Firth.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016.
Presents (in a postscript) how Chaucer's attitudes and "amused skepticism" toward fairies influenced later writers, including Spenser and Shakespeare. Analyzes connections between historiography of early modern witch-hunts and popular superstitions…
Green, Richard Firth.
Richard Firth Green and R. F. Yeager, eds. "Of latine and of othire lare": Essays in Honour of David R. Carlson (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2022), pp. 82-100.
Proposes that the so-called "quarrel" between Chaucer and Gower found in MLP pertains to their uses of Ovidian, fabliau-like material, reading several tales of "Confessio Amantis" as experiments in "fabliauesque" narrative, purged of "schoolboy…
Green, Richard Hamilton.
Dorothy Bethurum, ed. Critical Approaches to Medieval Literature: Selected Papers from the English Institute, 1958-59 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960), pp. 110-33.
Summarizes theories and meanings of conventional mythographic images and allusions in medieval literature, derived from classical fables and allegorized in late-classical and medieval commentaries on such fables. Includes comments on the allusion to…
The riddle at the end of FranT-who is the most "fre"?-distracts the reader from the central issues of the Tale, namely the concept of the "Real" (Pierre Macherey) and questions of gender. Although Dorigen is apparently excluded from the answer to the…
Argues that the Franklin presents a formula for happiness: living a life of "gentilesse" as opposed to the principle of adhering to a law-based system of morality.
Greene, Darragh.
Comparative Drama 55 (2021): 166-84.
Argues "that Chaucer's treatment of devils, damnation, and hell" in CT "resonates" in "Doctor Faustus," focusing on the yeoman-devil and "the force and binding implications of illocutionary acts" in FrT, as well as on "interesting parallels" between…
Greene, Darragh.
Garry L. Hagberg, ed. Literature and Its Language: Philosophical Aspects (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), pp. 149-71.
Explores the question of what Chaucer "holds to be the nature of reality," focusing on "the metaphysics of beauty" in PF, the "nature of the rocks" in FranT, and the "ontology of narrative itself" in NPT, and showing that "Chaucer's sensate faith in…
