Browse Items (16360 total)

Includes brief discussion of the Wife of Bath's claim that verbal disorder is the special preserve of women; in this way, the Wife shares important parallels with the unruly wife of Noah in the Chester and York Flood plays.

In a deliberate move to fit Constance of MLT to the genre of "hagiographic romance," Chaucer minimizes or eliminates the network of genealogical relations that gives the heroine significance and agency in Trevet's "Les cronicles," Chaucer's source.

At the crux of chronicle and romance, Geoffrey of Monmouth's "Historia" provides much of the basis for later literature. The work emphasizes women not only as child bearers but also as speakers who could uphold or deny legitimacy. Barefield discusses…

Barefield contrasts the characterizations of Constance in "Les Cronicles" and MLT, focusing on how female patronage (by Mary of Woodstock) may have encouraged the character's active role in Trevet's version.

Reads the Pandarus/Troilus relationship in TC as a variation on the priest/pupil motif also found in works by Ovid, Andreas Capellanus, Guillaume de Lorris, Jean de Meun, and John Gower.

Translates CT into Italian prose. Reprinted in various editions, complete and selected.

Describes the process and challenge of translating Chaucer into Italian. The volume also includes a round table discussion of translation, including comments about Chaucer, London standard, and Chaucer's stylistic and linguistic variety (pp. 91-103).

Law and its applications influence literary audiences, and Chaucer exploits the possibilties variously. In KnT, trial by combat fails to effect closure; Theseus must intervene. Melibee's final verdict acts similarly in Mel. In SumT, however, the…

Argues that Aristotelian theories of matter, form, and substance interact with medieval poetics, particularly in such works as ManT, SqT, "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," and those of Hoccleve and Metham.

Impartially uses documents, including fifteen contemporary accounts.

Through its several nested narratorial performances, each of which includes its own disavowals and subtle appropriations of authority, MLT renegotiates the relative power of spiritual and secular domains to control the interpretation and transmission…

Examines authorship and literary authority in the frame narrative of John Lydgate's "Fall of Princes," considering his references to Chaucer as well as to other poets, and arguing that Lydgate did not give a "disproportionate amount of literary…

Explores how Marie de France, the 'Orfeo' poet, Thomas Chestre, Chaucer, and John Lydgate "tell stories about the possibilities and problems of vernacular retelling . . . [and] imagine and enact a type of authorship--and a type of authority--based in…

The love ballad "Rosemounde" is a "sophisticated dramatic monologue" in which Chaucer unconventionally develops the theme of carnal versus spiritual love "through the 'persona' of a boastful knight." Through the comic irony of the ballad and the use…

Explores the potential for "training" a computer to identify spelling variants in Middle English texts, using Robinson's edition (1957) of CT as a basis for analysis. Describes a methodology, results, and perceived shortcomings.

An anthology of readings that pertain to medieval education among various classes and institutions, with individual readings drawn from primary sources and modern analyses, and with brief sectional introductions by the editor. Among the 95 readings…

A collection of essays, chiefly comparative. For four essays that pertain to Chaucer, search for Words and Wordsmiths under Alternative Title.

If Chaucer intended to turn Boccaccio's "Teseida" into a chivalric romance, he did not succeed, "but if his purpose was to make the frequently banal conventions and optimistic outlook of that genre play an ironic counterpoint to the tale's bleak…

Barnes contrasts the absence of the city of London in medieval fiction (CkT, CYT, and Athelston) with fictionalized descriptions of medieval London in murder mysteries written in the 1980s and 1990s by P.C. Doherty and Kate Sedley.

Brief introduction to Chaucer, his age, and his language, with samples in Middle English and modern translation, followed by a dramatization of adapted portions of GP and PardPT, in stylized modern English, prose and verse.

Reflected in RvT and FranT, rape is "mystified" in various forms of male discourse--discourse that substitutes the symbolic for the semiotic and thus keeps women silent or turns "no" into "yes."

Derives theory and definition from close readings of Prudentius's "Psychomachis," "Piers Plowman," "The Romance of the Rose," and "The Faerie Queene" as well as four more modern allegories.

Surveys the sources of Chaucer's lists and examines them for the effects they create, for the rhetorical ends they accomplish in undermining or leavening the direction of a tale or poem, as in TC, Anel, FrT, Rom, WBT, PardT, MkT, MkPT, MerT, Mel,…

The words "sodeny(ly)" and "proces" are keys to Chaucer's narrative skill. In both his serious and his comical narratives there are sudden changes in events, sudden shifts in emotions. He usually makes the sudden seem humorous, ridiculous, or…

Addresses problems in producing editions of medieval poems, focusing on TC and the editions and textual commentaries by Windeatt and Root as well as on Barney's own contribution to "The Riverside Chaucer." Considers such issues as Chaucer's…