Burjorjee, D. M.
Annuale Mediaevale 13 (1972): 14-31.
Surveys nautical imagery and pilgrimage-on-the-sea-of-life metaphors in the sources to TC, and discusses book by book Chaucer's uses of such figures in his poem, especially the sailing heart image, arguing that the varieties of imagery cohere to…
Rutherford, Charles S.
Annuale Mediaevale 13 (1972): 5-13.
Characterizes Pandarus as "a public figure, a chameleon, a consummate actor" who plays various roles, including that of "unrequited lover." His unusual moment of private lovesickness at the beginning of Book 2 is Chaucer's device for underscoring the…
Mathewson, Jeanne T.
Annuale Mediaevale 14 (1973): 35-42.
Argues that Chaucer's additions to his sources in PhyT (Virginia's speech and the reference to Jephthah's daughter) convey a sense of masculine blindness to feminine reality--seeing only the "transient conditions of beauty, youth, and virginity."
Summarizes critics' attention to the Eucharistic references in PardT and explores how the Eucharist and the Mass as a reenactment of sacrifice underpin a number of details and images in the tale.
Axelrod, Steven
Annuale Mediaevale 15 (1974): 109-24.
Critiques George Lyman Kittredge's notion of a feud between the Wife of Bath and the Clerk as "aesthetically displeasing," and argues instead that their tension is essentially jocular, a result of the Wife's hope that she can entice the Clerk. The…
Rogers, William Elford
Annuale Mediaevale 15 (1974): 74-108
Close reading of the speech patterns of the Canterbury pilgrims in the links between the tales, focusing on level of diction (Romance vocabulary), syntax, and figurative language, and relating these features to characterization. Comments at length on…
Kiernan, Kevin S.
Annuale Mediaevale 16 (1975): 52-62.
Chaucer has greatly expanded the role of Hector from his comparatively minor status in Boccaccio. As an honorable man of action and reason, Hector is a thematic contrast to Troilus, who is often prostrated by egocentric passions and loses Criseyde…
Koretsky, Allen C.
Annuale Mediaevale 17 (1976): 22-47.
Chaucer's chivalric heroes embody the theme of moral "gentilesse," though these knights are often depicted as corrigibly flawed in their characters. The romances emphasize their private lives (especially in love) over purely military or spectacular…
Clark, Roy Peter
Annuale Mediaevale 17 (1976): 48-57.
Developing from the Pentecostal parody in the poem, Chaucer's use of the word "wit" in SumT 1789, 2291 may suggest a submerged allusion to the contemporary controversy surrounding the Wycliffite translation of the Bible.
Whitlark, James S.
Annuale Mediaevale 18 (1977): 65-75.
Pagan gods represent planetary influences, alchemic symbolism,psychological allegory of emotional states, and historical examples of virtues or vices. They also dramatize the worldliness of Chaucer's characters and relate it to the condition of…
Lydgate's introduction of new critical terms and definitions--"enlumyn," "adourne," "enbelissche," "aureate," "goldyn," "sugrid," "rhetorik," and "elloquence"--shift poetry's emphasis from the variety and pleasure found in Chaucer's writings, to…
Davidson, Arnold B.
Annuale Mediaevale 19 (1979): 5-13.
Though aspects of ManT seem hopelessly irreconcilable, the tale itself is a coherent whole, its incongruities intentional. While the Manciple cunningly pretends to be a fool, he is, in a different sense, a far greater fool than he pretends to be. …
Rudat, Wolfgang E. H.
Annuale Mediaevale 21 (1981): 111-20.
The idea of sex as hard work and the portrait of January as lover draws on Augustinian theories of pre- and postlapsarian sexuality, also important in WBT and MkT; nevertheless, bawdy treatments of Christian theories are "harmoniously absorbed by the…
Wurtele, Douglas. J.
Annuale Mediaevale 21 (1981): 91-110.
Proceeding by "oblique allusions and undertones," the treatment of the Virgin in MerT is "mordantly ironic," leading up to January's "brazen parody of the 'Canticum Canticorum'." This blasphemy is appropriate to the Merchant's bitter cynicism.
Pratt, Robert A.
Annuale Mediaevale 3 (1962): 5-27.
Articulates the evidence for an "antifeminist, antimatrimonial" tradition in medieval Oxford and Paris that lies behind the contents of Jankyn's book in WBP, describing the backgrounds, transmission, availability, and collocations of Walter Map's…
Mahoney, John F.
Annuale Mediaevale 3 (1962): 81-99.
Revisits the concept of "Chaucerian tragedy," considering KnT, MLT, and NPPT, as well as TC and MkT, and explores the faults or faultlessness of Fortune's victims in these works, the moral sophistication of the narrators of the tales, classical…
Explores associative and metaphoric links between Chaucer's Miller (GP and MilP), the devil, and Pilate, who was "traditionally an agent of the devil."
Haller, Robert S.
Annuale Mediaevale 6 (1965): 47-64.
Explores how female sovereignty in WBPT results in "the subservience of the class function to the bourgeois ethic which the Wife represents," indicating parallels in FranT and Genesis. Alison controls the merchant class in her first three marriages;…
Describes relations between structure and theme in TC, demonstrating how the poem's pattern of action and verbal parallels induce "classical symmetry" and function as a "metaphor of harmony and order, while an "underlying chaos" of "inverted…
Treats the narrator-dreamer of BD as the poem's "central character" and a device of unity and dramatic irony. The character does not "develop" psychologically, but his polite good nature--comically limited by his ignorance of courtly idiom--enables…
Comments on Chaucer criticism produced between 1950 and 1964 and, treating Chaucer's work as a "single fiction," reads it as a "complex examination of what it means to love" in earthly and spiritual ways. An "abyss exists between" the two kinds of…
Peck, Russell A.
Annuale Mediaevale 8 (1967): 17-37.
Explores the imagery, action, and word-plays of SNPT to show that they are "concerned with the interplay" between the dark, mundane world and the bright heavenly one. In their "werk," both the Second Nun and Cecilia help others to achieve "their full…
