Woods, William F.
Chaucer Review 24 (1989): 139-49.
The social background of ShT offers a rationale for the actions of the characters, especially of the wife. Her struggle to achieve parity in her mercantile marriage transforms her into a reflection of her husband. The monk, who is a "competing…
Condren, Edward I.
Chaucer Review 23 (1989): 192-218.
Despite the crossed purposes of the Prioress's secular and religious impulses, each impulse paradoxically reaches fruition in PrT. In creating the young boy as an innocent so like herself and then describing his martyrdom with the particular…
Fradenburg, Louise O.
Exemplaria 1 (1989): 69-115.
The differences between modernity and the Middle Ages can enable, rather than disable, interpretation. Applying modern critical theory to PrT can undo the absoluteness on which much historical thinking is based and can enlighten the dilemma of…
A non-Augustinian, antifeminist English tradition of the devil's mousetrap interprets it as a symbol for temptation and entrapment of the soul. The Prioress's distress in GP 143-45 therefore need not signify her sinfulness, as argued by Stephen…
Patterson, Lee.
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 11 (1989): 117-75,
Th and Mel should be read in light of Chaucer's struggle to define his authorial role in opposition to courtly "makers"--thus, the appropriation of minstrel performance in Th and of a narrator and hero described in terms associated with children. Th…
Mel and Th function together to create a game that shows and explores how author and audience together manipulate and receive language in the creation of a text.
Boitani, Piero.
Piero Boitani. The Tragic and the Sublime in Medieval Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (1989), pp. 20-55.
The Monk's "de casibus" tragedy poses a problem for the modern reader with an idea of tragedy that involves fallibility, sin, and error. Chaucer himself holds a more complex idea of tragedy than does the Monk. Chaucer's version differs from Dante's…
MkT is very likely a virtually unrevised early poem, the first to be written after Chaucer's return from Italy in 1372 and his first collection of stories. As such, it deserves a separate existence, as Chaucer's early poem 'De casibus vivorum…
The statement that the fox "thurghout the hegges brast" into the barnyard, which does not accord with the earlier description of the yard as surrounded by a fence and a dry ditch, is perhaps best accounted for as a narrational paraphrase of the name…
The central question for NPT is not whether it is allegorical or ironic but how it uses allegory and irony to refigure its own past. This tale was composed for a court audience at the beginning of a new vernacular tradition. What kind of authority…
Hitchcox, Kathryn Langford.
Dissertation Abstracts International 49 (1989): 3033A.
Most scholarly treatments of Chaucer and alchemy deal with whether Chaucer believed in alchemy or whether he condemned it, but Chaucer's primary concern with alchemy was to use it as "symbolic language," especially in SNT and CYT. This salvific…
In CYT, Chaucer's comic use of technical terms related to alchemy or to alchemists (e.g., "craft," "disciplyne," "emprise," "experience," "labour," "loore," "maistrie," "multiplicatioun," "philosophie," "science," "travaille," "wirkyng,"…
PardT, ParsT, and Ret all treat the moral complexities of language. Applying a text from Timothy, quoted by both the Pardoner and the Parson, reveals that the Pardoner's discourse is barrren; the Parson's fruitful. Ret is the fruit of ParsT.
ParsT makes use of a tradition of penitential mediation (cf. ParsP 55 and 69) on the virtues and vices. In the plan of CT, ParsT abandons the emotive fiction and fables of the earlier tales for the solid ground of meditation, transforming an earthly…
Wurtele, Douglas J.
Mediaevalia 11 (1989, for 1985): 151-68.
Those similarities to Lollard doctrine--protest against blasphemy, unwillingness to "curse for tithes," and distaste for storytelling--that have been used to argue that Chaucer's Parson was a Lollard or Wycliffite were not peculiar to the Lollards;…
Traditions of simultaneous affirmation and negation found in pseudo-Dionysian mystical theology account for Ret's treatment of the reader and its relation to CT.
The unadorned, unironic ParsT is what Chaucer wanted for the ending to CT. The Ricardian pattern of sickness, pilgrimage, and penitence shows why Thomas Gascoigne's narrative of Chaucer's deathbed retraction of his writings is a likely story, or not…
The shift from the first person of Anelida's complaint to the third person of the narrator's commentary is not an artistic flaw. Attributing the commentary to the Chaucerian narrator is consistent with that character's pose as inexperienced and…
Machan, Tim William.
Chaucer Review 24 (1989): 150-62.
That the Bo scribes altered their text in a number of substantive ways suggests that the "Consolatione" was not a fixed text but a living tradition. This tradition became even more diverse whenever the "Consolatione" was translated. The implication…
Hewitt, Kathleen.
Papers on Language and Literature 25 (1989): 19-35.
BD "questions the very nature of the relation between text and interpretation." Each of the four divisions of the poem examines a different relation of source and text.
Kooper, Erik Simon.
Dissertation Abstracts International 49 (1989): 2651A.
The Aristotelian view that the marital relationship can involve friendship (found not in Augustine but in Aelred of Rievaulx and Thomas Aquinas) influenced Jean de Meun, translator of Aelred. De Meun's treatment of the matter in "Roman de la Rose"…
Kruger, Steven F.
Dissertation Abstracts International 49 (1989): 2651A.
Kruger investigates the ambivalent nature of dreams in light of various classical and medieval dream theories, as well as actual accounts of dreams. The "middle vision," neither divine nor satanic, figures in Langland, Nicole Oresme, and Chaucer (BD…
