Browse Items (16382 total)

Ecocritical examination of "heavy atmosphere" as an environmental state, an affective state, and/or a narrative tone or "feel" in several of Chaucer's narratives, with focus on RvT, TC, and KnT. Explores parallels between medieval cosmology, humoral…

Short story about an Oxford graduate student, ambivalent about love and about her Chaucer studies, visited by the poet at nighttime. Includes recurrent allusion to the ambiguous gate in PF 123ff.

Surveys medieval treatment of cats in science, witchcraft, bestiaries, proverbs, fables, and literature. Notes Chaucer's occasional references to cats in MilT, WBP, and SumT.

Includes brief discussion of ABC in light of alphabetic poems and other medieval teaching devices.

Studies Chaucer's tales that revolve around miracles and saints. Maintains that SNT, PrT, and MLT reveal "Chaucer's artistry in deploying his understanding of medieval English piety."

Explains how medieval pilgrimages, including Chaucer's "temporary community" of pilgrims in CT, are influenced by a "series of concentric circles" of multiple communities.

Contends that although BD, HF, and PF are secular poems, Chaucer's structure and wordplay in the dream poems "juxtaposes the secular and the spiritual, the classical and the Christian in complex tension."

Addresses issues of morality and moral perspectives by looking at the wording and structures within the CT, Chaucer's lyrics, and LGW.

Explores how "enquiry-based learning (EBL)" as a pedagogical approach can be used to help undergraduate students understand Chaucer's religious context in CT.

Discusses how US students' "grasp of Chaucer's work is hampered by their lack of biblical and doctrinal background" and offers suggestions for teaching CT, including journal exercises that foster interaction among students.

Offers approaches to teaching ethics and spirituality in CT. Provides models and suggestions for teaching CT, and for preparing seminars and conferences designed for new or experienced teachers.

Suggestions for using NPT and MLT for teaching the religious elements of Chaucer in secondary, undergraduate, and postgraduate MA level classes.

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…

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.

Explores Chaucer's "employment of Lollard ideas and motifs" in the CT, particularly in ParsPT and WBP, and in the G version of the LGWP. Argues that Chaucer's rhetoric and portrayal of Lollardy reflects how he wants readers to understand the…

Discusses Chaucer's exploration of the relationship between churls and the Church in the GP, and in Chaucer's fabliaux, particularly MilT.

Discusses "non-Christian religion" represented in the CT and examines what it means to be a Jew in PrT or a Muslim in MLT. Argues that Chaucer's understanding of Judaism in PrT and Islam in MLT reveals the "ironies of self-identity and the patterns…

Contends that Chaucer's romances, including KnT, MLT, WBT, SqT, FranT, Th, and TC, "exhibit . . . interest in adversity, or philosophical or religious contempt" for suffering as a primary theme.

Explores religious content of Marian prayers found in ABC, PrP, SNP, Ret and MLT. Argues that Chaucer does not attempt to "simplify moral issues and theological questions" in his tales of saints.

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…

The Wife of Bath (the female counterpart of the "senex amans") stands in opposition to the Husband-Merchant in MerT. They are "mercantile figures of similar status and class," the Wife involved in production, the Merchant in export. Each sees sex…

In light of speech-act theory and the conventions of courtly literature, Dorigen's playful promise to Aurelius in FranT is not binding. Aurelius's own interpretation of the promise is willfully self-interested.

The two descent scenes in the tale of Ceyx and Alcyone are similar to epic descents. The descent of Ceyx is typical and traditional; that of Alcyone, nontraditional and unheroic.

Traces the development of the relations between illusion and courtliness from Boccaccio to James Lasdun's story in the "The Siege," including a discussion of FranT that focuses on the "demande d'amour" that concludes the Tale.

Describes several layers of allegorical meaning in NPT, explaining them in an ascending scheme of specific to general, content to form; suggests that Chaucer artfully combines the incommensurable to maintain both jest and earnest.