Browse Items (16382 total)

While we cannot be sure of Chaucer's pronunciation of "Berwyk" (CT 1.792), one manuscript version of Bradwardine's memory treatise may suggest the loss of medial (w).

While the "Siege of Thebes" can be read in terms of Lydgate's anxiety about his relationship to KnT, its combination of narrative and moralizing is principally influenced by developments within the tradition of the "roman antique." Lydgate's work is…

The hermeneutic method in Nicholas of Lyra's "Postilla" gave new richness to the understanding of the biblical "sensus literalis," expanding it to include parabolic senses and typology, and fostered more interactive reading. Similar principles seem…

The existence of a fifteenth-century Middle English translation of Trevet's "Chronicle" indicates that one may have been available to Chaucer and Gower in the fourteenth century.

Tallies devices in WBP whereby Chaucer sought to "criticize and belittle his own creation": blasphemy, intrusions of male discourse, contradiction, and various forms of distortion and exaggeration. But the Wife's "loud, polemical voice ... carries…

The Wife's pain and anxiety in regard to clerical pronouncements on the sinfulness of carnal pleasure in marriage and on the superiority of virginity to the married state suggest that she is reacting chiefly to the dominant "rigorist" school of…

Manuscript rubrics variously identify the genre of Petrarch's story as "mythologia," "fabula," and "historia" (perhaps the least constricting choice). Some rubrics emphasize Griselda's wifely virtues of obedience and fidelity, while others single…

Reads the kiss between the Pardoner and the Host at the end of PardT as a challenge to "the repressive binaries of a hermeneutical model based on heterosexual reproduction." The Pardoner inverts dominant ideology, and the kiss brings to readers'…

The Prioress's combination of pious sentiment, moral blindness, and indifference to official church doctrine can be paralleled in a 1985 attempt, in an Austrian village, to defend and preserve an anti-Semitic legend about the murder of a…

Abridged version of a portion of Dinshaw's Chaucer's Sexual Politics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), pp. 28-64.

A historical assessment of representations of heterosexual love and marriage in the art, myth, and religion of the Western world, concentrating on differing ways in which esteem and desire have been aligned, rationalized, and sanctified.

Compares the knights in "Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnell" and Gower's "Tale of Florent" with the knight in WBT to show that the Wife of Bath is an antifeminist character.

Focuses on Elizabethan versions of the Griselda story but includes discussion of how the context of CT dislocates both allegorical and literal readings of ClT. Efforts to resolve this dislocation prompt Elizabethan and later versions.

Includes an account of the making and reception of Pier Paolo Pasolini's films "The Decameron" (1971) and "Canterbury Tales" (1972). In the latter, Pasolini plays Chaucer and includes seven "Tales": Merchant's,Franklin's, Cook's, Miller's "Wife of…

In plot and dominant ideas, PardT reflects the opposition between avarice and mercy common in the medieval vices-virtues tradition. The avaricious Pardoner lacks mercy, and the recurring notion of voluntary poverty in PardPT can be linked with mercy…

Examines the differing ways Hoccleve, Lydgate, and Henryson responded to and imitated Chaucer, observing their sensitivity to his metatextual concerns and his sense of literary history. These three authors do not comprise a single and unified…

The syntactical and lexical innovations in Bo suggest that Chaucer followed Jean de Meun's principles of "open translation" for rendering Latin into the vernacular; similar principles were articulated in the Prologue to the later version of the…

German verse translation of CT in iambic tetrameter.

Viewed in light of A Midsummer Night's Dream, KnT is "more comic" than traditionally assumed; its cyclic pattern of "proliferating catastrophes becomes humorous."

Hoad challenges critical discussions of specific words and syntactical emphases in Chaucer on the grounds that modern linguistic intuition is unreliable, comparison of medieval uses is often flawed, and medieval commentary can be misleading.…

Examines differences in punctuation between Robinson's second edition of PF and the text in Benson's The Riverside Chaucer. Concludes that modern punctuation might sometimes distort Middle English style, especially in colloquial speech.

Describes Chaucer's uses of rare and unique words in Th through comparison with the language of other romances by Chaucer and other writers.

Describes political and military events involving Edward, the Black Prince, Pedro of Castile, and his rivals that led up to the military campaign of 1366. Suggests the nature and timing of Chaucer's likely participation in these events, perhaps as an…

Reports on how notions of heterosexual normativity can be used in classroom discussions of BD, TC, and CT.

Everhart considers Chaucer's translation strategies in Bo and identifies his unusual one-to-one substitution of "hap" for Latin "casus" in that work. Multiple connotations of "hap" in TC imply a different, playful rhetoric of translation that in turn…