Browse Items (16381 total)

ManT, Mel, and ParsT are hardly tales at all, but rather a joke, an allegory, and a sermon. Yet they provide interesting comparisons between speakers and listeners, ways of speaking and ways of holding back. Reading between the lines is needed before…

Piety and pathos heighten the impact of PrT and promote the narrator's reputation for religious correctness, yet all aspects of her Tale are undermined by pointlessness. Greenwood argues that the Tale is dialogistic and Menippean; a satirical subtext…

Surveys recent criticism of ClT, focusing on Griselda as allegory, as "a figure of divinity," and as a flat figure. Concludes that Griselda may simply be read as a real person.

Greenwood contrasts Chaucer's and Malory's uses of models and antimodels in depictions of chivalry and courtly love.

Greenwood examines the meaning of "manly" as applied to the character of Theseus in KnT.

Greenwood studies types of friendship, plus the positive and negative values attached to friendship, in FranT, MerT, and Mel.

Explores how the comic elements of Chaucer's narrative detachment in TC "qualify the tragedy or pathos" of the poem, and how diction, word-play, and five-book structure contribute to its tragicomic impact.

Review controversies regarding the editing of medieval texts, faults the new "Riverside Chaucer," which represents no "textual advance over Robinson 2," and judges that "what Bowers offers is the best of two worlds--fidelity to auctorial usage…

Analyzes Thomas Hoccleve's narrative persona in his "Regement of Princes" and his "Series" poems, treating it as a development out of "the inherited Chaucerian narrator" toward a psychological portrait marked by the deleterious effects of "thought"…

Comments on theories that underlie the practice of editing Middle English texts, using Chaucer's Summoner as an extended analogue for such a commentary.

Assesses Chaucer's and Lydgate's inset lyrics for the ways that they imply "a sense of poetry as an assemblage of physical materials collected from the past, and poets as the collectors and mediators of those materials." Considers aspects of BD;…

Argues that the concern with the "basic duality between material and spiritual values" in CYPT is based in Boethius's admonitions against pursuing false felicity in his "Consolation of Philosophy," manifested in the Canon's Yeoman's concern with…

The use of "but" helps the reader determine the moral character of both the Parson and the Narrator.

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.

The potential medieval etymologizing of "envoluped" and the association of "fundament" with Christ and his Church deepen the significance of the exchange between the Host and the Pardoner.

Draws upon theories of Aristotle, Bradwardine, Aquinas, and the scholastics on action ("operatio") to explain the complexities of the Wife's character and the nobility of the hag's lecture--through the Wife's competence in "scholastic give-and-take."

Chaucer's concept of "fyn," or end, is illuminated by the "Nicomachean Ethics" of Aristotle, which is more important as a source for Chaucer than has been recognized.

Tudd, the third shepherd of the Chester play, may be a priest's bastard (son of Tibb); his hauteur recalls the Miller's wife in RvT.

MLT reflects the occupation of its teller both in its concern for "legal particularities" and in its vision of the beauty and order of the law, in such terms as "prudence" and forms of "govern." Constance's own name suggests "justitia."

The prayer for might to "make in som comedye" (TC 5.1788) is not a scribal error but an indication that Chaucer may have seen the poet, like God, as a creator who enters his own fictive world and creates from "within" it.

Analyzes Chaucer's use of the science of optics in RvT.

Although Chaucer typically "covered his tracks," a major source of HF is Plato's "Timaeus" in the translation and commentary of Chalcidius.

Argues that ClT reveals the teller's "professional, speculative turn of mind" in contrast with the Wife of Bath's "rigorous sort of pragmatism," commenting on the Clerk's "academic terminology," his academic "awkwardness," and Walter's trial of…

Identifies the sexual and medical implications of several details in the GP description of the Monk, including his association with venery and food, his baldness, and his being fat "in good point" (1.200).

Comments on details of the Monk's description in GP, explaining how they characterize him as "both an epicure and a sexual connoisseur."