Browse Items (16381 total)

Describes similarities between medieval and modern uses of obscenity to establish homosocial identity and assert power, using evidence from CT manuscripts to clarify the "sexually explicit status" of the late medieval verb "swyven."

Examines late medieval British literary texts (lyrics, pastourelles, flytings, "alewife poems," "schoolroom texts," etc.) for their use of obscene language and imagery to shape and convey attitudes toward gender and sexuality, both positive and…

In light of newly discovered documents surrounding Cecily Chaumpaigne, calls for more attention to the servant women depicted in Chaucer's texts and the use of the word "endure" in his corpus.

Analyzes "how English and Scottish literature and law during the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries connected the figure of the tapster to sex work, transgression, public harm, and dangerous agency over men," and traces residue of this misogyny…

Surveys and critiques "wench" as a term and a concept in medieval English texts and explores how "Chaucer's wenches [in CT] embody the term's developing signification of intersectional disadvantage connected to age, gender, labor, reproductive…

Identifies Criseyde's comment to Troilus about consent in TC, 3.1210–11 as evidence of her awareness of difference between "survival strategy" and "affirmative consent."

Maps out the way in which anger and community are depicted in different versions of Philomela's rape, displaying the power that is represented in this anger and community, before linking this history of female anger to contemporary artists, such as…

That "Daphnaida" is based on BD has long been recognized. But whereas Chaucer's poem works within the conventions to assuage grief, Spenser's anti-pastoral produces an uncomfortable tension between instruction and pity.

The compiler-editor-scribe of the prose history in Trinity College, Oxford MS D 29 used ParsT and Mel as a source in six passages. The same scribe included Mel and MkT in Huntington MS HM 144. Harris describes the scribal adjustments of Chaucer's…

Surveys what is known and what can be inferred about the origins of the so-called Findern manuscript, its scribes, manuscript affiliations, and codicological features, with recurrent comments on the works by Chaucer that are anthologized in it (PF,…

Lollard insistence on plain speech brought about a split between plain and literary language that persisted into the sixteenth century. Harris considers the "Pearl" poet and the fifteenth-century reception of Chaucer.

The reasons for Chaucer's low reputation in the seventeenth century were as much aesthetic as linguistic. He was a pawn in the battle over enrichment of the language; his works violated the principles of decorum; the medieval genres he used had…

Assumes that the Death and the Old Man in PardT are "one and the same person," and provides evidence from Scandinavian literature that Odin was an analogous figure, perhaps even a distant source, although Christianized.

Assesses prior critical treatments of Chaucer's uses of rhetoric and traces a pattern of development from his use of the "conventional methods of expansion and embellishment" of the medieval rhetoricians, through "increasing independence" to…

In contrast to the painful stasis of the temples of Mars and Venus, which Chaucer found in Boccaccio's "Teseida," the invented Temple of Diana emphasizes mutability and transformation, revealing the "hidden, more original concern" of KnT with the…

Argues that Form Age transcends its sources to offer "its own glimmer of hope" for new textual communities.

Describes birds mentioned by four English poets, one chapter apiece. An opening chapter surveys classical backgrounds for zoological and interpretive ornithology, along with the uses of birds in medieval encyclopedias. The Chaucer chapter addresses…

Harriss studies English social and political history from the Hundred Years' War to the Wars of the Roses as a period of cultural transformation that established the "shape of English society and government" that "it was to retain until the Civil…

Harrow explores social criticism in Sembene Ousmane's novella "Le Mandat" (film version "Mandabi") with references to thematic similarities in Chaucer's PardT. Both Ousmane and Chaucer portray the effects of unexpected treasure on its beneficiaries…

Provides climatological evidence that Chaucer's GP references (1.1-2) to drought in March and rain in April are realistic as well as symbolic.

Examines the methods and results of Thomas Tyrwhitt's editing of Part 1 of CT, focusing on his notes and glossary.

Despite belittling remarks by some of his characters about the matter of composing in English, there is no evidence that Chaucer himself is embarrassed to use English as his medium of composition.

Illustrated social history of late-medieval England, with literary examples drawn from CT and contemporaneous literature, with visual reproductions from various manuscripts, including the Ellesmere manuscript and printed facsimiles. Arranged…

Numerology is an aesthetic basis for TC. The architectural metaphor of Geoffrey of Vinsauf and Euclid's theorem on proportion in triangles can be used to demostrate proportions (involving line numbers) in TC.

Although Old English poetry always depicts Satan as supernaturally powerful (while doctrinally powerless), late-Middle English works show him as comic, the boaster who must fail--as in the mystery cycles followed by the morality plays. In Chaucer's…