Browse Items (16382 total)

Summarizes the "textual world" of the late-medieval England and describes the international development of the printing press. Comments on references to literacy and literate materials in Chaucer's works, explores the implications of Adam, remarks…

This webpage coordinates and comments upon approaches to medieval texts as "multimodal"; designed for classroom use, with suggestions for further exploration and hypertext links to texts, illustrations, and related materials. Arranges the approaches…

Approaches Mel as a mirror for princes, concerned with the power of lordship and the value and function of proverbs and didactic literature. Includes several classroom projects and questions for discussion.

Describes distinctions that derive from transgender politics and explores how the gender and sexual identities in SumPT--"largely constructed by and through its twin genres of antifraternal critique and fabliau"--"insinuate that friars are both…

Explores the "complications" involved in defining "environment," "landscape," and "nature" in MerT, and views the narrative through an "ecocritical" lens, describing the critical method and showing that in the Tale "literary devices revolving around…

Encourages readers to keep track of the money in ShT, assessing the coded actions of gifting, receiving, and reciprocating in the Tale, analyzing the merchant's response to Don John's request for 100 franks (7.281-96), and suggesting that the readers…

Treats the breaking of sisterhood (Emelye and Hippolyta) and brotherhood (Palamon and Arcite) in KnT as Chaucer's adaptations of Ciceronian ideals in order to "intensify questions of desire agency and social justice" in the face of worldly…

Comments on the possibly harmful and/or fraudulent aspects of "japes" in CkPT, offering information about the food trade in medieval London and considering the Cook's "mormel" (GP 1.386) to be a sign of his vulnerability. Designed for pedagogical…

Describes features of medieval economic practice that underlie the SqT and the Franklin's interruption of it, investigating fundamental interrelations among food, land, and social status and their resistance to occlusion. Designed for pedagogical…

Approaches SNPT as translations of source materials, assessing Chaucer's assignment of his early life of St. Cecilia to the Second Nun as narrator, the implications of rhyme royal, and the thematic and formal concerns of transformation, idleness, and…

Revises and expands De Gaynesford's essay "Speech Acts, Responsibility, and Commitment in Poetry" (2013), which identifies a type of poetic performative speech-act that he labels the "Chaucer-type," explaining it by reference to the poet's dedication…

Argues that the Ceyx and Alcyone episode in BD, unlike its antecedents in Ovid and Machaut, reveals the inadequacy of "elegiac poetics," particularly the formal strategy of prosopopoeia, to "voice" the dead. Similarly, in the body of the dream, White…

Shows how PhyT both frustrates formal classification and foregrounds problems of reading and interpretation. Virginia is a text who is "misread" and rewritten by Apius, Virginius, Harry Bailly, and even Virginia herself.

Traces allusions to BD and PF in Gower's "Cinkante balades" as preserved in the Trentham manuscript. The "intertextual play" and "interpretive challenges" activated by these allusions contribute to Lancastrian legitimization at the same time that…

Considers the "history of staging readers' first encounters with the opening lines" of CT from manuscript to modern print editions, emphasizing the "material form" of GP in "The Riverside Chaucer." Explores the tension between "the formal qualities…

Proposes that Chaucer's commitment to "technical experiment" in fixed-form verse is marked by skepticism and ambivalence in comparison to classical and contemporary European models. Several of Chaucer's poems--BD, LGW, PF, and TC--reveal a concern…

Analyzes the epistemology of form as theorized by Boethius, Chaucer, and Kant, particularly in relation to the apprehension of natural beauty. Reads Form Age and For, in the manuscript setting of Cambridge University Library, MS Ii.III.21, as…

Argues that HF, like Virginia Woolf's "To the Lighthouse" and Lyn Hejinian's "My Life," rejects a "hermeneutic of linear causality." Both Chaucer and the postmedieval authors develop the potential of the dream-vision form to advance a "literary…

Reads the tragedies that constitute MkT as disability narratives, exploring how formal strategies within stanzaic units interface with a thematic focus on bodily disorder. MkT enacts a "symbiotic relationship between literary form and social…

Claims that Astr shares with Chaucer's "literary" works a deep conceptual investment in form and is more than a technical manual. Astr layers textual, celestial, and technological forms (book, cosmos, and astrolabe) in a dynamic relationship with…

Traces the "motif of visible speech" in HF, identifying its source in Dante's "Divine Comedy," and exploring its relations with questions of literary transmission, especially in depictions of the story of Dido, the eagle's speech, and the House of…

Describes the "religiös motivierte Xenophobien" (religiously motivated xenophobia) of PrT and comments on the degree to which it may be considered satirical.

Considers the relationship between Chaucer's position in courtly society and his attitude toward his female audience through the examination of his creation of female characters, especially those in TC, LGW, Mel, and WBP.

Introduces Japanese analogues of PardT dating from the seventeenth or eighteenth century, and compares them with their Chinese and Indian ancestors, in order both to hypothesize the genealogies and to trace the change of motifs through transmission.…

Shows that throughout his career Chaucer "attempts to stike a balance between apologizing for the instability of his meaning and open acceptance of the capricious nature of language." Comments on Chaucer's attitudes toward language, interpretation,…