Ganim, John M.
Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990.
Beginning with Kittredge's argument that the thematic and structural unity of CT lies in the pilgrims and their dramatic interchange, and moving to the counterarguments of Muscatine (1957), Robertson (1962), Jordan (1967), Pearsall (1985), and Benson…
Frank, Robert Worth,Jr.
C. David Benson and Elizabeth Robertson, eds. Chaucer's Religious Tales (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1990), pp. 39-52.
Through pathos, Chaucer evokes the audience's sympathy, thus transforming PrT, MLT, and ClT from mere tales of wonder or religious abstraction into convincing, dramatic treatments of the virtues they celebrate.
Cowgill, Jane.
C. David Benson and Elizabeth Robertson, eds. Chaucer's Religious Tales (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1990). pp. 171-83.
Like MLT, SNT, ClT, and WBT, Mel employs a feminine style of persuasion. Prudence "demonstrates" the values she counsels her husband to abide by, thus adding actions to arguments as means of persuasion and subverting the male hierarchy. ParsT, by…
Collette, Carolyn (P.)
C. David Benson and Elizabeth Robertson, eds. Chaucer's Religious Tales (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1990), 95-107.
Similar in context and form, SNT and PrT have evoked critical commentary on historical background, sources, and analogues. However, PrT has sparked more consistent and recent interest, in part because of the Prioress's personality, her relationship…
Brown, Emerson,Jr.
David G. Allen and Robert A. White, eds. Traditions and Innovations: Essays on British Literature of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1990), pp. 50-58.
CT, like the intellectual disputes of the fourteenth century, is characterized by extremes. Applying David Knowles's discussion of the period to fragment VII of CT, Brown notes that ShT, PrT, Th, Mel, and MkT show the "tendency to extremism…
Benson, C. David.
C. David Benson and Elizabeth Robertson, eds. Chaucer's Religious Tales (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1990), pp. 137-44.
Not all of Chaucer's religious tales are alike. In MLT and ClT, Chaucer "transforms the same basic material into two radically different, though equally valid, varieties of religious poetry." A religious romance, MLT "employs great rhetorical…
Benson, C. David.
C. David Benson and Elizabeth Robertson, eds. Chaucer's Religious Tales (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1990), pp. 1-7.
Darwinian, Freudian, and Marxist approaches to CT have "obscure(d) the historical and intellectual context of the religious tales" (Mel, ParsT, ClT, MLT, PrT, SNT), making them the "most marginalized" of Chaucer's works. Articles in the…
Benson, C. David.
Piero Boitani and Anna Torti, eds. Religion in the Poetry and Drama of the Late Middle Ages in England (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1990), pp. 101-17.
Argues that "Chaucer is as much a religious artist as a comic artist" and that to exclude either fabliaux or religious tales is to reduce the achievement of CT. Examines the common aesthetic of PrT, SNT, MLT, and ClT, which despite their stylistic…
Yoshimura, Koji.
Eigo Seinen (Tokyo) 136 (1990): 118-22.
Examines Chaucer's various uses of color expressions: metaphorical, contrastive, mixed, etc. Yoshimura argues that there is a gradual transmutation from simplicity to complexity in Chaucer's use of such expressions.
Windeatt, Barry.
Ruth Morse and Barry Windeatt, eds. Chaucer Traditions: Studies in Honour of Derek Brewer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 1-20.
The first English author to think of his writings as a whole and as having a posterity, Chaucer in the two "Prologues" to LGW, the introduction to MLT, and Ret lists his writings as an assembled corpus of individual works. "At the close of 'Troilus…
Tinkle, Theresa Lynn.
Dissertation Abstracts International 50 (1990): 3240A-3241A.
Although the medieval Venus and Cupid are usually interpreted interchangeably on the basis of "courtly love" or the Robertsonian concept of "caritas" and "cupiditas," analysis of texts (including HF, PF, KnT, TC, and LGW) indicates otherwise. Venus…
Takamiya, Toshiyuki.
Ruth Morse and Barry Windeatt, eds. Chaucer Traditions: Studies in Honour of Derek Brewer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 263-68.
The list of Derek Brewer's writings that closes this volume reveals the range and energy of his interests: critical interpretation of Chaucer, editing of medieval texts, historical views of Chaucer's life and work, Chaucer as a narrative poet, and…
Strohm, Paul.
Lee Patterson, ed. Literary Practice and Social Change in Britain, 1380-1530 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 83-112.
London politics in the 1380s were characterized by "shifting planes of alliance." Such shifting in the early years of the decade led to the eventual struggle of 1385-88 between Richard's court party and the duke of Gloucester's aristocratic…
Storm, Melvin.
Jane Chance, ed. The Mythographic Art: Classical Fable and the Rise of the Vernacular in Early France and England (Gainesville, University of Florida Press, 1990), pp. 215-31.
Examines the role of tone and narratorial voice in Chaucer's manipulations and distortions of the myth of Theseus in HF, Anel, LGW, and KnT. Theseus is vilified in HF and LGW as a betrayer of women; in KnT, he exemplifies mature "martialism…
Salisbury, Joyce E.
New York and London : Garland, 1990.
Interdisciplinary (covering religion, medicine, history, literature, and philosophy from early Christian times through the late Middle Ages), this annotated and indexed guide to medieval sexuality and attitudes toward sex and the body contains…
A collection of new and previously published articles (1984-88), including five on the relationship between human beings and God. Reinterprets various images, spiritual and secular, in saints' lives, sermons, religious lyrics, and especially…
Paxson, James J.
Dissertation Abstracts International 50 (1990): 2484A.
Although personification is currently devalued, analysis of its poetic codes of invention reveals its complexity in the works of Prudentius, Langland, Spenser and Chaucer (HF and PF).
Reed, Thomas L.,Jr.
Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 1990.
A prominent feature of Middle English debate poetry from 1200 to 1450 is irresolution, a quality appreciated in the context of carnival laughter (Bakhtin). Reed rejects univocal interpretation through allegory or symbolism in favor of "experiential…
Patterson, Lee, ed.
Berkeley : University of California Press, 1990.
A collection of seven articles on late-medieval culture, literature, and the problems of historical interpretation. Treats Chaucer, Langland, and others.
Fyler's assertion that Chaucer's ambiguous use of generic and gendered "man" is both self-conscious and consciously feminist assumes a false stability of meaning for the generic masculine and ignores the critical construction of authorial…
Vance's concept of "power semantics" articulates how Chaucer uses transgressive exempla--"meta-examples which confound expectations"--to pit the discourse of medieval history against itself in PardT, predicating a literal critique of medieval culture…
Nolan, Edward Peter.
Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press, 1990.
Studies the figure of the Pauline paradigm "videmus nunc per speculum in aenigmate" (1 Cor. 13.12) in Western ontology and epistemology, examining "the functions of intra- as well as intertextual literary mirroring" (Virgil's use of Homer, Chaucer's…
Muscatine, Charles.
Ruth Morse and Barry Windeatt, eds. Chaucer Traditions: Studies in Honour of Derek Brewer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 249-62.
Posits that "different ages or cultures do not so much misread a great text (from a different time or place) as make from it special abstractions, acutely suited to their particular concerns." At midcentury, the twentieth-century reception of…
Mroczkowski, Przemyslaw.
Piero Boitani and Anna Torti, eds. Religion in the Poetry and Drama of the Late Middle Ages in England (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1990), pp. 83-100.
In the context of medieval culture from the late eleventh century to Chaucer's time, the author examines Chaucer's faith and orthodoxy in ABC, ParsT, MLT, Mel, ClT, PrT, SNT, and Ret, as opposed to his critical spirit in his portrayals of various…
