Browse Items (16381 total)

Stockton reads the Pardoner as a "cynic" in a Marxist context: one who "submit[s] fully to an ideological structure despite knowing better." Contrasts the Pardoner's queerness with his cynicism, asking,"how queer can the Pardoner be when he guards an…

Normandin argues that a "surplus of urine in the absence of fecal matter affects the tone" of WBP. Chaucer "associates the Wife of Bath with urine because antifeminist traditions often represented females as liquid, dripping creatures and because…

In "Ars Amatoria" and "Remedia Amoris," Ovid provides "habits of thought" that give medieval thinkers a vocabulary to describe "the operations of what we would today call ideology," or the conforming of the self to conceive social institutions as…

Edwards discusses the rites and purposes of mourning in KnT in relation to the psychological theories of Freud and Derrida. Contrasts the Freudian account with medieval practices of theology and Purgatory. Tthe pagan setting is necessary to…

Considers "Testament of Cresseid" as a "Nebenmensch" (next man, or neighbor) to TC, doubting or negating it rather than emulating it, and, by "the logic of imperial translation," suspending England's rise as Scotland's "hostile neighbor."

Raybin compares the work by the Indonesian novelist Pramoedya Ananta Toer with ClT. Both works involve a powerful man who marries a poor girl and who eventually dismisses her. Pramoedya pays careful attention to the heroine's thoughts and feelings,…

RvT "confronts the paradoxical status of women's desire" in medieval Christian and feudal systems. The Tale's "significant divergences from the fabliau tradition" and several resemblances to the story of Theseus and Ariadne help undercut KnT; its…

Late medieval manuscript illuminations show Danes and other northern pagans with costumes and weapons that are emblematic of the Near East. Like MLT and Gower's Tale of Constance, these images indicate that the term Saracen included various…

Considers Mel as an allegory of translation, proposing that Chaucer applies legal theory drawn from Henry de Bracton's "De legibus et consuetudinibus Angliae" to questions of ownership. In MelP, Chaucer uses "thyng" as a legal term pertaining to an…

For Chaucer, Rome is an ancient imperial capital, a goal of medieval pilgrimage, and a center of trade--trade in devotions, indulgences, and pardons that allies mercantilism and religion. Such a Roman transaction also involves relics or monuments,…

PrT depicts "the production and exigencies of wonder" in concert with the ambiguity and inscrutability of the miraculous. The abbot reestablishes the distinction between the animate and the inanimate by removing the mysterious "greyn," which does not…

Explores international cultural exchange and openness in the Middle Ages, commenting on scenarios of medieval cosmopolitanism in three modern fictions: Youssef Chahine's film "Destiny," Tariq Ali's novel "Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree," and Milorad…

Fradenburg begins with a brief psychoanalytic view of the aesthetic of enjoyment as the communication of affect. The article explores the image of Alceste/daisy in terms of psychological and philosophical intersubjectivity. The individual stories,…

Redresses neglect of medieval views in recent materialism studies, arguing that "that medieval definitions of matter, both hylomorphic and humoral, constitute their own versions of 'materialism,' versions that can help us to historicize later…

Argues that "two medieval methods of memorializing" are in tension in KnT: "celebration" of chivalric loss, and Boethian remembrance. Theseus's admonitions to remember Arcite "leave little room" for "healthy" mourning and reveal the limits of…

Reads the rape motif of WBT against the background, context, and language of the Statute of Rapes (1382), arguing that the tale uses "narrative strategies made possible in late-medieval regulation of 'raptus'" to present "the realities of gendered…

Argues that genre and the discourses of desire in MerT prove too strong for the narrator, who is constantly conflicted about his presentation not only of linguistic and narrative desires but also of the psychoanalytic displacements of these desires.

In MLT, Custance's first husband is the "Sowdan of Surrye," and in "Macbeth" the witches plot to scourge a shipmaster who is "to Aleppo gone." That both texts treat Syria and the northern reaches of Great Britain as complementary zones, in space as…

Analyzes LGW as "a narrative treatise on the 'affect of invention,'" linking the processes of emergence that precede the mind's conscious recognition of emotion with the inventional processes which culminate in poetic art. LGWP introduces a method…

Maintains that MLT represents cultural and textual transmission through a network of premodern media: voices, texts, bodies, culture, human actions, and nonhuman forces---media which represent an alternative to the hegemonic, institutional, and…

Uses HF, which sets "archival totality" in an uncertain relation to the experience of reading, to introduce a discussion of how in our reading "discursive systems, rather than particular texts, become objects of knowledge." Aims to theorize a…

Reads HF as an example of how a literary work constructs "discursive scale," making us self-conscious about how we read and interpret, when we read closely, and when we distance ourselves and see the text in relation to genres and systems, history,…

Studies a late medieval manuscript, San Marino, Huntington Library, HM 144 (c. 1500), which is a compilation of works chosen for their devotional and/or ethical content. Uses Mel to show how the scribe--by omitting portions of a text and…

Summarizes the discussions of Chaucer in Lynn
Staley's "The Island Garden" (2012), Jamie K. Taylor's
"Fictions of Evidence" (2013), and Jonathan Hsy's "Trading
Tongues" (2013).

Uses examples from CT, TC, and the anonymous Middle English Dialogue of Solomon and Marcolf, read in a context created by Bakhtin's theory of "speech genres," to demonstrate the power of proverbs to transform the situations in which they are…