Browse Items (16391 total)

Discusses how Chaucer deals with "regulations and expectations of fourteenth-century Christianity," especially in relation to Chaucer's views on sex, virginity, gender, and marriage. Focuses on BD, PF, TC, ClT, MerT, WBP, NPT, MilT, and PardT.

Focuses on the "ars moriendi" (art of dying) manuals, that might have influenced Chaucer's writings on death, dying, and Purgatory in the MLT and PardT, among others. Includes background on treatises on the art of dying as well as changing attitudes…

Addresses how Chaucer uses religious "collections, florilegia, anthologies, and miscellanies" along with Latin Bibles and patristic sources to develop his characters in CT, and to reflect "their level of biblical knowledge and literacy." Refers to…

Critical essays examine Chaucer's religious writings. Sixteen essays focus on fourteenth-century religious practices, and religious influences on Chaucer's writings, and offer ways of teaching religious themes and issues in Chaucer. For individual…

Evidence that verses from Chaucer's Westminster tomb were transcribed, possibly on site, into copies of Stow's 1561 edition.

Challenges the identification of Adam Pynkhurst with Scribe B (the "label nowadays given to the scribe" of the Hengwrt and Ellesmere manuscripts of CT). Surveys the history of identifying Pynkhurst as Scribe B, examines paleographical and linguistic…

In the Ricardian period, English poets adopted strategies of indirection and displacement to comment on political power. The rulers' speeches in the KnT and the ClT reveal Chaucer's sense of power.

Examines Chaucer's use of the prefix "y"- in the history of the English language.

A report on a project creating a comprehensive textual collation between the text of TC in Corpus Christi College, Cambridge MS 61 (Cp) and Barry Windeatt's 1990 edition of TC. Using Cp as a copy text, Windeatt not only attempted to reconstruct…

Variants in TC passages depicting Criseyde's fluctuating affections reveal the reactions of both early scribes and modern editors to ambiguity in Chaucer's language.

Essays examine influence of classical learning, Germanic and Old Norse cultures, and Romance languages on the development of medieval English literature and language. For essays pertaining to Chaucer, search for From Beowulf to Caxton under…

Explores intersections between the "new formalism" and the close study of the formal features of late-medieval manuscripts, surveying recent scholarship and focusing on analyses of Chaucer's Adam and the scribe Adam Pinkhurst. These analyses…

Examines fifteenth-century scribal responses to sexual language in the CT, noting that some manuscripts either replaced obscenities or added to sexual language. Observing that female narrators in the CT are restricted in their use of vernacular…

Pity's "double life" as person and quality "calls attention to the mechanics" of allegory and to one's "ordinary" experience of pity; through word play, pity is both dead to the frustrated lover and alive to others.

MLT engages with ideas found in Latin and French treatises advocating crusade and assesses the rhetoric and practices of crusades, critiquing their mercantile aims, the ignorance of cultural differences dooming efforts to convert Muslims, and poor…

In their attention to language as "an active part of social life," the FranT, NPT, and ManT constitute a language group whose tales are deeply rhetorical in the sense that they look closely at how language works as "an entity, process or phenomenon,"…

Swooning in medieval literature points to a marked cultural contrast between medieval sensibilities and modern ones for which swooning is extreme and exceptional. This broad survey defines swooning as a "loss of consciousness, brought on by…

Chaucer, Lydgate, and Henryson recognized a song's ability to excite and articulate passionate feeling and they invoke the idea of song in their works in ways that call attention "to the formal qualities of song itself." Zeeman inquires into "the…

Examines twenty-five CT mss in which "Gamelyn" appears and makes suggestions about the tale's relationship to the CT, arguing against the notion that early scribes included it on "wholly whimsical grounds." Its inclusion early in the textual…

For six essays that pertain to Chaucer, search for Medieval Latin and Middle English Literature under Alternative Title.

Observes that scribes often used more than one exemplar. In the case of at least one CT manuscript (Oxford, Corpus Christi College, MS 198), the scribe's addition of glosses from an exemplar apparently received late in the copying process resulted in…

Da Rold's study of Cambridge University Library MS Dd.4.24 (a manuscript of CT) suggests that variations in shades of ink helps to disclose scribal habits of copying and emendation as well as the continuity of the exemplars used. Argues for further…

A collection of essays addressing the history of the book, manuscript studies, culture, and history of late medieval England. For two essays that pertain to Chaucer, search for Production of Books in England under Alternative Title.

Studies how Chaucer's ClT may have been affected by the Italian textual tradition. The first part of the book concentrates on the Italian texts, particularly the Manelli codex of Boccaccio, "Decameron" X.10. The second part considers how the Hengwrt…

Eleven articles on medieval women and/or literature for them, especially works that are written by women authors. For one essay that pertains to Chaucer, see Piero Boitani, "Marie de France and the Breton Lay in England," (pp. 211-26).