Baker, David, ed.
Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1996.
A symposium on English poetic meter. Robert Wallace proposes ten rules for clarifying discussion of meter, and fourteen writers critique the validity and utility of the propositions; Wallace responds in a final essay. Recurring concerns include the…
Baker, David.
Robert Tubbs, Alice Jenkins, and Nina Engelhardt, eds. The Palgrave Handbook of Literature and Mathematics (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), pp. 23-40.
Exemplifies how Chaucer "has a great deal of fun with the coalescence of medieval arithmetic, geometry and logic into a single discipline more recognizable today as mathematics," exploring the "proto-probabilistic" dicing and poison-bottle selection…
Suggests that Chaucer identifies the virtuous women in MLT, ClT, PhyT, and Mel with one of the four cardinal virtues to enhance the characteristics found in his sources.
MLT, ClT, and PhyT address the same question: how can God allow the innocent to suffer and the wicked to go unpunished? Although in each case Chaucer enhances the virtue of the protagonist and the pathos of her suffering, he tests diverse…
The two modes of ClT must not be confused. The allegorical mode culminates in the Clerk's moral of Griselda as an example for all Christians, male or female; the literal mode culminates in the Clerk's implicit criticism of Walter's imperiousness as…
Baker, Denise N., ed.
Albany : State University of New York Press, 2000.
Eleven essays examining the reciprocity between literature and history in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. For two essays that pertain to Chaucer, search for Inscribing the Hundred Years' War under Alternative Title.
Baker, Donald C.
Studies in Bibliography 39 (1986): 125-32.
William Thynne used manuscripts in addition to printed texts for his edition of SqT. Evidence suggests at least two manuscripts very similar to extant texts, a fact that reinforces Thynne's claim to being "editor" as well as "printer" of CT.
Baker, Donald C.
Beryl Rowland, ed. Companion to Chaucer Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), pp. 428-45.
Substantive criticism of PF really begins in 1935 with Bronson, who stated that the poem is a study of contrasts between man's views of love. Later critics have elaborated this view, noting the polarities of the work: the "Somnium" and the garden,…
Baker, Donald C.
Paul Ruggiers, ed. Editing Chaucer: The Great Tradition (Norman, Okla.: Pilgrim Books, 1984), pp. 157-69.
Summarizes Furnivall's capacious contributions to Chaucer studies (and Middle English generally), and comments that his "chief contributions" to the editing of Chaucer lie in his "selection of the texts" to print and his care with copying, printing,…
Baker, Donald C.
Studies in Philology 59 (1962): 631-40.
Treats the theme of "gentilesse" in ClT as a response to its presence in WBT, arguing that it helps to characterize the Clerk, underlies Walter's decisions, and encouraged Chaucer to choose "precisely this legend for exactly this spot" in CT.…
Baker, Donald C.
University of Mississippi Studies in English 3 (1962): 35-41.
Explores how exempla and citations of authority--both largely via allusive names--are used by the Friar and the Summoner in order to compete with the Wife of Bath and criticize each other.
Baker, Donald C.
Journal of English and Germanic Philology 60 (1961): 59-64.
Focuses on Chaucer's selection and arrangement of exempla drawn from Jerome's "Adversus Jovinianum" to argue that Dorigen's complaint (4.1367-456) is a "carefully shaped and molded passage of rhetoric designed to illuminate the character of Dorigen,…
Describes medieval coins referred to in Chaucer and other Middle English literature, particularly the florin, noble, 'écu' or shield, 'mouton d'or,' and ducat. Comments on the designs, values, and usage of these coins and corrects several…
Baker, Donald C.
South Central Bulletin 21.4 (1961): 33-36.
Suggests that "traditions of witchcraft" are "the source of some of the language and . . . part of the motivation of the dispute" between the Friar and the Summoner, adducing late-medieval associations of friars and sorcery and the Summoner's diction…
Baker, Donald C.
University of Mississippi Studies in English 1 (1960): 97-104.
Argues that "the role of the artist as purveyor of Fame" is the fundamental unifying theme of HF and suggests that Chaucer may have intended to resolve tensions between Dantean and Boethian views of the poet (as teacher and misleader, respectively)…
Baker, Donald C.
Studia Neophilologica 30 (1958): 17-26.
Demonstrates "the extremely close dove-tailing of the three major sections" of BD "and the way in which they complement and illuminate one another" through parallel incidents and atmosphere. Then examines "the imagery patterns in the poem" to show…
Explores and explains rhetorical emphases in the narrator's growth in understanding of the Black Knight's loss in BD, arguing that full realization comes (in ll. 1309-10) only after it "had been subordinated first by confusion and then by…
Baker, Donald C., ed.
Norman: University of Oklahoma Press,
A variorum edition of Chaucer's SqT based on the Hengwrt and built on the model that has evolved over many years: critical and textual introductions, newly established text for SqT, collations providing evidence both of the manuscripts and of the…
Baker, Donald C., ed.
Norman: University of Oklahoma Press,
The latest volume of the Variorum Chaucer to appear, Baker's edition based on Hengwrt, collates ten manuscripts and twenty-one printed editions with extensive critical commentary, survey of the criticism, and bibliographic index.
Baker, Joan, and Susan Signe Morrison.
Kathleen M. Hewett-Smith, ed. William Langland's Piers Plowman: A Book of Essays (New York and London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 41-67.
Baker and Morrison read MerT as a "sustained response" to Piers Plowman B.9. Both works are concerned with marriage, gender, and the pursuits of appetite. Whereas MerT poses a woman who must live expediently, Piers Plowman absorbs gender into…
Baker, Joan,and Susan Signe Morrison.
Yearbook of Langland Studies 12 (1998): 31-63.
MerT is a direct response to passus 9 of the B version of Piers Plowman, presenting an "unkyndely similitude" of marriage in contrast to the ideal expressed in Langland's poem.
Baker, Peter S.
Vincent P. McCarren and Douglas Moffat, eds. A Guide to Editing Middle English (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), pp. 263-83.
Suggests that "hypertextuality" is the only major advantage of electronic texts over books and indicates an ideal system for a critical edition in electronic format by examining a "working model" of such editions of "Beowulf" and "Battle of…
Baker, Peter S.,and Nicholas Howe, eds.
Toronto, Buffalo, and New York: University of Toronto Press, 1998.
Seventeen essays by various autors, focusing primarily on Old English language and literature. For three essays that pertain to Chaucer, search for Words and Works under Alternative Title.
Bald, Wolf-Dietrich, and Horst Weinstock, eds.
Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1984.
Seventeen essays on Old and Middle language and literature. For five essays that pertain to Chaucer, search for Medieval Studies Conference Aachen 1983 under Alternative Title.
