Browse Items (16382 total)

Unlike Machaut's knight, Chaucer's Black Knight, when describing his lady, shifts his attention from her outward appearance to her inner nature, as if he gradually comes to realize her value to him--a realization that helps him cope with her death.

The narrator of the dream poems is not a consistent character,as previously thought, but a progressive one, embodying Chaucer's later preoccupation with experience versus authority. The narrator of BD is a doer; that of PF, a reader. Their…

Both the historical basis for BD and its relation to Machaut's narratives have posed problems, but the dream-vision form can resolve them. Whereas Machaut used it to divide himself from his patrons, Chaucer employed it to indicate their "shared…

Chaucer's handling of the dreamer-narrator of BD proves sensitive and subtle in its exploration of genre, irony, tension, and artistic capability; the poem foreshadows Chaucer's later mastery.

The inspiration for the text of the painted chamber with its "text and gloss" in BD was St. Stephen's chapel with its lavishly painted walls. Previous efforts to correlate Chaucer's text with particular illuminated manuscripts have been futile.

Doubtful of M. L. Samuels's argument that Equat is Chaucer's work, Benson examines dominate and recessive spelling forms to argue that it is not. Compares spelling in Equat with that of various manuscripts of TC and CT.

Compares the vocabulary and style of Equat, Astr, and other contemporary scientific treatises, concluding that variations between Equat and Astr cast doubt on Chaucer's authorship of the former.

From Ovid, the blind Cupid connoted erotic love to mythographers, French poets, and eventually Chaucer (HF), Clanvowe, Lydgate, and others.

In HF, Chaucer criticizes incompetent poets for pursuing fame, claiming fame for himself as a true poet. (In Korean, with English abstract.)

Examines late-fourteenth-century English attitudes toward crusading as background for Chaucer's view of the Orient as a form of the "Other." Evident in LGW, Chaucer's views reflect the prejudices of his age, which regarded Orientals as irredeemable.

Questions assumptions about Chaucer's authorial practices and challenges J. L. Lowes's theory that F is the earlier version of LGWP. G may be earlier, a hypothesis that accounts for structural differences in the two versions and for numerous lexical…

Chaucer's tale of Hypsipyle and Medea (LGW 4) shares verbal features with the "Gest Historyale of the Destruction of Troy" and the "Laud Troy Book." Not derived from one another, they may go back to an earlier Middle English translation.

In contrast to the uniformity specified in LGWP, the legends themselves, when examined in light of the nominalist principle of particularized language, reveal widely differing heroines, not indistinguishable victims. ShT functions as pattern; CYT as…

The placement of Chaucer's PF in MS Bodley 638, MS Laud Misc. 416, and MS Digby 181 suggests that the poem can be interpreted, respectively, as suggesting the value of courtly love, stressing the importance of "proper governance," and illustrating an…

In PF, personal happiness and community service result when proper choices are made. Lovers must be aware of their individual roles in society.

The summary of "Somnium Scipionis" is closely linked with the dream, distinguishing the past narrator, who reads the "somnium" and dreams the dream, from the present narrator, who summarizes the "Somnium" and his dream. (In Japanese.)

The artistry of Chaucer's poetry is influenced by his historical role as a "negociis regis" employed to argue, persuade, and "embrace opposing doctrines" in the name of the king. Chaucer's skill as a negotiator can be seen in TC, wherin Criseyde,…

"Bear the bell" (TC 3.198) is best explained through a Welsh phrase in Dafydd ap Gwilym referring to falconry. Falcons wore bells, and the phrase meant "to be pre-eminent."

Ovid's Narcissus becomes polysemous, generating figures of language among "Pearl" (Dreamer as Narcissus); TC (narrator's drawing on the myth for rhetoric to link pagan and Christian); "Piers Plowman B" (Christian Narcissus and "dreamer-Will"); and…

Sixteen essays or portions of longer works, all pertaining to metafictive or metatextual aspects of TC as a self-conscious work of literature. Each includes a synoptic introduction. For the nine essays that are here published for the first time,…

Contrasts Chaucer's depictions of desire in TC with source passages in Boccaccio's "Filostrato" and with a passage in Dante's "Purgatorio." Chaucer's depiction is based on the "impoverished" view of desire presented in Boethius's "Consolation" and…

Examines the roles of loss and violence in the construction of feminine figures in chivalric literature, considering such constructions in light of fourteenth-century social history. In TC, Chaucer considers the relation between heroism and suffering…

In Filostrato, Troilo's accurate decoding of Criseyde's language enables him to discover her reciprocal desire, leading to fulfillment. In TC, fulfillment is more complex as Troilus, Pandarus, and the narrator each construct their own meaning of…

In TC 1, the narrator's initial confidence that Troilus is an exemplary figure conflicts with the reader's growing awareness of the narrator's limited knowledge of love and its conventions, paralleling Troilus's own movement from confidence to…

The unresolved ending of TC capitalizes on concern with means and ends throughout the poem, encouraging readers to resist the illusion of closure in any act of interpretation.