Recent critical theory emphasizes reading from the margins to interrogate problematic "master narratives." When one teaches Chaucer to undergraduates, however, such interrogation may become "naturalized" as a new master narrative for…
Chaucerians must encourage or revive linguistic and cultural literacy of the Middle Ages among students and colleagues, both because the Middle Ages are of significant interest in popular culture and because they offer access to "familiar…
Like Chaucer's pilgrimage, community colleges accept all comers and promise a miraculous transformation of a clientele representing a cross-section of society. The student-pilgrims prefer the spoken to the written word, requiring frequent reading…
An electronic text of "Canterbury Tales" can give explicit attention to important philological issues--e.g., metrics, Middle English dialects, pronunciation, etymologies--so that class time can be devoted to the literary, historical, social, and…
Introducing small readers' theatre productions of scenes from Chaucer into the classroom reinforces the sounds of Middle English for students, allows them to get personally involved in the class, focuses their attention more closely on Chaucer's…
Theoretical studies of Chaucer often discourage student interest because of their difficulty and narrow focus. Teaching Chaucer to a diverse population in a small liberal arts college requires materials and activities such as videos, slides,…
Because a Chaucer class is often a student's only medieval course, we should incorporate fifteenth-century Chaucerian writing into our classes to expose students to the active reception of literary works, the social and/or literary uses to which…
Max Weber's distinction between an "ethics of commitment" and an "ethics of responsibility" can help make the connection between theoretical assumptions and pedagogical practices explicit. An "ethics of commitment" leads to the idea of the teacher…
The Man of Law uses the discourses of orientalism and antifeminism to suggest the proximity of Islam to Christianity and of women to men, as well as the necessity of reinscribing Muslims and women as clearly delimited Others. MLT attempts to forge a…
Morrison, Susan Signe.
Exemplaria 8 (1996): 97-123.
WBPT addresses the relationship between vernacular texts and female audiences. Vernacular translations of authoritative texts allow women to enter the discourse of power, creating a new discourse that validates not only the existence of a different…
The electronic "preprints" of "Teaching Chaucer in the Nineties" revealed both the extent to which professors and students have become electronically literate and large disparities in the availability of electronic resources. Ironically, no papers…
Fehrenbacher, Richard W.
Exemplaria 9 (1997): 341-69.
Readers who refuse to recognize Pandarus's incestuous desire risk participating in the denial of such desire in patriarchal societies; they also risk colluding in society's invocation of the incest taboo, which underlies traffic in women.
Hines, Jessica.
Exemplaria: A Journal of Theory in Medieval and Renaissance Studies 34 (2022): 130-47.
Compares the "structures of feeling" in PrT and Gower's "Tale of the Jew and the Pagan," particularly their interrelations of pity, violence, justice, antisemitism, and affective response. Suggests that the two authors reworked their versions at the…
Sanok, Catherine.
Exemplaria: A Journal of Theory in Medieval and Renaissance Studies 34 (2022): 252-59.
Explores relations among "crisis, ambivalence, and futurity," focusing on TC and "Amis and Amiloun," "assessing Criseyde''s ambivalence about returning to Troy as "an affective correlative of crisis" and Amis's ambivalence about the sacrificial…
Lochrie, Karma.
Exemplaria: A Journal of Theory in Medieval and Renaissance Studies 34 (2022): 267-73.
Points to Chaucer's coinage of the English word "future" in his translation of Boethius in Bo, and considers Criseyde's use of it in TC (5.746) and her concern with her future reputation (5.1058–64). Aligns the poem's themes of "human futurity" and…
Finger, Roland.
Exit 9: The Rutgers Journal of Comparative Literature 5 (2003): 65-74.
Assesses the sexual relations between the Wife of Bath and her husbands in WBP as a dynamic between her sadism and their masochism. Through her sadism the Wife "avenges herself on the medieval patriarchal subordination of women."
Suggests that "double meaning seems deliberate" in a pun on "lecher" and "healer" in Pluto's use of "lechour" (MerT 4.2257) when he pledges to restore January's eyesight.
Griffith, Philip Mahone.
Explicator 16 (1957): item 13.
Assesses Chaucer's use of the name "Damian" in MerT as an allusion to St. Damian who, with his brother St. Cosmos, was associated with medical healing. Attends to a pun on "leech" (healer) in the tale.
Emerson, Katherine T.
Explicator 16 (1958): item 51.
Explains the Host's reference to "gentil Roger" in GP 1.4353 as a possible play on "Roger Knyght de Ware, Cook," found by Edith Rickert in a 1384-85 plea of debt and reported in the "Times Literary Supplement," October 20, 1932, p. 761.
Glosses "party" in "party white and rede" (KnT 1.1053) as "literally 'parti-colored,'" referring to a single kind of flower, the daisy, citing LGWF 42-43 as evidence.
Explores proverbial implications of the variant readings of KnT 1.1810, "than woot a cokkow or [var. of] hare," and suggests "hare" might be a pun on "whore."
Suggests that Jerome's "Ad Rusticum Monachum" (125:11) is the ultimate source of the linking of "baskettes" and the apostles in PardP 6.444-47, and aligns the Pardoner with the Wife of Bath through their shared anti-asceticism.
Severs, J. Burke.
Explicator 23.3 (1964): item 20.
Comments on the uses of "master" and "Rabbi" in SumT 3.2184-88 as a means to convey the hypocrisy of the Summoner's friar (along with Chaucer's Friar in GP 1.261). The references are rooted in the biblical source, Matthew 23:5-11.
