Browse Items (16382 total)

Explores the implications of ascent and descent in MerT, focusing on the significance of the tale's vacillations between courtliness and the fabliau genre in comparison with several analogous narratives that include fruit-tree episodes. In French,…

Argues that HF depicts a journey through the mental operation of using traditional classical material to generate new literature (tidings) and, in doing so, reflects aspects of late medieval understanding of psychology and economics. Crucial to the…

Describes medieval dream visions, characterizes Chaucer's examples as simultaneously concerned with destabilizing assumptions and containing dissent, and compares aspects of Chaucer's dream visions with the "postmodern" horror movie series, "A…

Honegger argues that analyses of international forms of address would gain depth if critics considered "situational" factors and even "competing interactional" factors along with traditional considerations of ye/thou pronouns. Focuses on addresses to…

Describes the "difficulties faced by scholars in unraveling" the complications involved in the usage and nuances of meaning of late Middle English you /thou pronouns, with particular attention to Chaucer's works, Eustace Deschamps' address to…

Assesses the northernisms in RvT and the speech of the bastard in Shakespeare's King John as examples of "nonstandard" language in a time when a standard was only developing. In both pronunciation and lexicon, the northernisms of RvT "should perhaps…

Quantitative analysis of the language of cognition (e.g., "intellect," "knowing," "wit") in Chaucer reveals how such language entered English usage. Borrowings from French and Latin entered with specific, high-prestige philosophical or scientific…

Compiles spelling variants of 'though' (thirteen manuscripts) and the verb 'work' (ten manuscripts) as they occur in CT, seeking to establish Chaucer's basic orthography and to explore scribal habits.

Explores the role of taboo on the semantic shift of the term 'bug' from an object of terror to an insect. Assesses the occurrence of the word in the Delaware manuscript at NPT 7.2936, where other manuscripts have devils.

Traces uses of various prepositions ('of,' 'for,' 'with,' and 'in') and participles in conjunction with the adjective 'weary,' identifying when and where the uses were most frequent in Old and Middle English. Draws examples from Chaucer.

Classifies instances of verbal aggression within and across narrative layers in CT in several groups: direct, embedded, mediated, or indirect. Considers the speaker, the addressee, and the target of aggression, exploring twenty-two examples.

Surveys critical discussion of the prosodic behavior of Romance loan words in Middle English, challenging the Halle/Keyser analysis and the reliability of rhyme. Providing examples from alliterative poetry, Chaucer, and Henryson, Minkova argues that…

Argues that lines 81-120 of HF are Chaucer's adaptation of the topos of the "book curse," tracing the "speech act origin" of the curse and exploring Chaucer's use of the device to "tease his audience and manipulate its expectations."

Explores the "reciprocal status of antiquity and celebrity" in the reception of Chaucer, his "construction (and self-construction) as a vernacular authority," and the relations of fame and temporality in his works, especially MLP. Recurrent concerns…

Argues that fifteenth-century verbal and visual depictions of Chaucer as an "aged penitent" (in Gascoigne, Hoccleve, Gower, Scogan, and the Bedford Hours) reflect the Derridean (and Augustinian) gaps that are evident in Ret and elsewhere in Chaucer's…

Discusses Eustace Deschamps's balade in praise of Chaucer, the Duxworth manuscript of Chaucer that belonged to Jean Angouleme, and two sixteenth-century French references to Chaucer that evince French awareness of Chaucer as a poet: an anecdote about…

Describes a change in Chaucer's "linguistic fame" from fifteenth-century praise of his rhetoric and aureate diction to sixteenth-century admiration of his plain speaking: a shift that reflects the early modern "Inkhorn Controversy" and efforts to…

Looks at the "transition of the invented textual presence of Chaucer in the late Middle Ages to the invented personal presence of the poet in the early modern period." Comments on several spurious links between tales in the Lansdowne 851 manuscript…

Explores how Chaucer used Petrarch, Petrarch used Dante, and Dante used Virgil: a sequence of influence that underpins Chaucer's "conception of renown" and encouraged him to lay claim to belonging to the schiera (band) of famous poets. Discusses…

Surveys classical and medieval skeptical views of the significance of fame and contrasts the attitudes toward reputation expressed by Criseida in Boccaccio's "Filostrato" and Criseyde in TC, focusing on the heroines' views about infamy before leaving…

Describes how in Book III of HF Chaucer engages with Dante's "Commedia", especially Canto XI of the "Purgatorio"; focuses particularly on speaking silences, tacit allusions, and concerns with infamy.

Reviews the presence of Statius's "Thebaid" in TC, exploring in detail the juxtaposition of Statian and Ovidian material in Cassandra's explanations of Troilus's dream of the boar, explaining Chaucer's elision of Boccaccio from his poem as Chaucer's…

Surveys knowledge of and responses to HF from the earliest manuscripts and printed editions to Alexander Pope's adaptation, "The Temple of Fame" (1710), with commentary on early uncertainty about the title and author of HF, and on the "ways in which…

The authors present statistical summaries of complex predicates in Astr and Equat and hypothesize about why such scientific texts contain a relatively low percentage of these predicates.

Includes references to GP, MLT, SNT, ClP, PrT, and FrT.