Fisher, John H.
Text: Transactions of the Society for Textual Scholarship 6 (1994): 165-80.
Since no authorial text of CT or TC is available for a best-text edition, a combination of the habits or "uses" of the earliest scribes, with spelling normalized to accord with Equat, should be used to produce an edition. Fisher exemplifies such an…
Kendrick, Laura.
Bulletin des Anglicistes Medievistes 46 (1994): 926-38.
Explores wordplay involving French and Anglo-Norman "bords" that may have authorized the use of the borders of medieval illuminated manuscripts for visual jesting, contestation, and derision. Considers the verbal "borders" of CT in relation to this…
McClellan, William.
Studies in Bibliography 47 (1994): 89-103.
Three important omissions (including omission of ClP) strip the HM140 text of ClT of its "Canterbury" context. Whether these were deliberate excisions or a consequence of problems in production cannot be demonstrated conclusively.
Machan, Tim William.
Philological Quarterly 73 (1994): 299-316.
A clear-text, eclectic edition provides convenience and coherence for the reader by presenting a text (such as Chaucer's) as the artist's completed product. But current interest in "versioning"--seeing the text as a process by comparing versions and…
Machan, Tim William.
Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1994.
Machan identifies and defines specific cultural and textual factors particular to Middle English works. He argues that textual criticism, in its evolutionary approach, is consonant with source-and-analogue criticism. Today's standard texts develop…
Argues that Chaucer's similes cannot be explained in terms of imitation of Dante and Boccaccio or direct imitation of classical models. Instead, following the example of Dante and Boccaccio, Chaucer practiced a "poetics of vernacularization,"…
Calabrese, Michael A.
Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1994.
Examines Chaucer's uses of Ovid, assessing the former's perception of the ancient poet, tracing Ovidian reception in the Middle Ages, and exploring Chaucer's reflection of Ovid's stuggles with life and art.
Calin, William.
Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994.
Surveys medieval English responses to and assimilation of Anglo-Norman and continental French literature, with separate sections on (1) Anglo-Norman romance and hagiography; (2) major continental French narratives and authors, including "Huon of…
Hamel, Mary.
Robert R. Edwards, ed. Art and Context in Late Medieval English Narrative: Essays in Honor of Robert Worth Frank, Jr. (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1994), pp. 149-62
Critics have attributed Chaucer's description of naval warfare in the Legend of Cleopatra to his knowledge of contemporary battles. Hamel argues instead that Chaucer, like other medieval writers and even historians, drew the elements of his…
Rudd, Niall.
Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994.
Chaucer drew on two classical sources, Virgil's "Aeneid" and Ovid's "Heroides," to illustrate two themes. In HF, complex characterizations of Venus, Aeneas, and Dido illustrate different meanings of Latin "fame"; in LGW, Dido's queenliness is…
Van Buuren, A. M. J.
Erik Kooper, ed. Medieval Dutch Literature in Its European Context. Cambridge Studies in Medieval LIterature, no. 21. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 151-67.
The Dutch writer Potter (d. 1428) followed a career similar to Chaucer's and also translated the Old French "Melibee." Van Buuren discusses Gower's and Chaucer's uses of Ovid and analyzes Potter's "Der minnen loep" ("The Course of Love") for its use…
Anderson, Judith (H.)
English Literary Renaissance 24 (1994): 638-59.
Spenser's depictions of the Bower of Bliss and the Temple of Venus ("The Faerie Queene" 2 and 4) are indebted to PF and, to a lesser degree, Th for explicit references and more general personal and cultural allusions.
Aronstein shows how Henryson, influenced by late-fifteenth-century attitudes toward women, especially prostitutes, returns the story of Criseyde to its pre-Chaucerian misogynistic purpose. The article examines the story's literary history and its…
Bloom, Harold.
Harold Bloom. The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (New York, San Diego, and London: Harcourt, 1994), pp. 105-26.
Appreciative criticism of Chaucer and his contribution to Western literary tradition, especially his anticipation of Shakespeare as a comic ironist and creator of self-conscious characters. Focuses on CT--in particular, the Falstaffian vitality of…
Catalogues thirty-one previously unlisted references to Troilus, Criseyde, and Pandaras published 1475-1640. Part of a work in progress: an updating of the "Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed ... 1475-1640" and of Caroline Spurgeon's "Five…
Dane, Joseph A.
Huntington Library Quarterly 57 (1994): 99-123.
Discusses variants in editorial and antiquarian reports of the Latin inscription engraved on Chaucer's tomb and the verses "about the ledge" of the tomb. Suggests that the "snowy tablet" supposedly fixed by Surigone to a pillar near the tomb on…
Fisher, Judith L.
Poetica: An International Journal of Linguistic Literary Studies 39-40 (1994): 155-77.
Examines the iconography of nineteenth-century engravings of select Canterbury pilgrims published by Knight. The postures, details, and styles in the engravings reflect assumptions about social order, as well as Knight's program of educating his…
Similarities in the depiction of character, in the pilgrimage topos, and in the reworking of source material suggest Chaucer's influence on "The Waste Land." Evans explores Eliot's academic and scholarly familiarity with Chaucer.
Johnson, James D.
Chaucer Review 29 (1994): 194-203.
An annotated list of thirty-seven items, intended as an update of Caroline Spurgeon's "Five Hundred Years of Chaucer Criticism and Allusion, 1357-1900."
Argues that Keats marked the British Library copy of TC, once owned by Charles Cowden Clarke. The markings indicate Keats's concerns with burgeoning love and with Criseyde's character as developed in books 1-3, but they "do not provide definitive…
Maley, Willy.
Studies in Philology 91 (1994): 417-31.
Spenser's Irish English was modeled both on Chaucer's language and on an archaic dialect of English that survived in Elizabethan Ireland. The "Old English peasantry" in Spenser's Ireland spoke a form of English similar to Chaucer's.
Tintner, Adeline R.
Henry James Review 15 (1994): 10-23.
Daisy Miller was modelled on "another martyr to love": Alceste of LGWP. Tintner documents James's familiarity with Chaucer and his imitations of Chaucerian diction. She reads Daisy as an inexpert, desperate lover similar to the victims of love in…
Watson, Nicholas.
Karen Pratt, ed. Shifts and Transpositions in Medieval Narrative: A Festschrift for Elspeth Kennedy (Woodbridge, Suffolk; and Rochester, N.Y.: D. S. Brewer, 1994), pp. 89-108.
The relation of Lydgate and Henryson to Chaucer is anxious and competitive; their retellings of TC help canonize Chaucer but also subvert "his authority by criticizing or outdoing him." Lydgate associates Chaucer with Criseyde's falsity and "stands…
Rusch, Willard J.
American Journal of Germanic Linguistics and Literatures 6 (1994): 1-50.
Studies of Chaucer's rhymes have traditionally assumed that textual criticism and historical phonology together could recover lost information about the pronunciation of his verse. The rhymes, however, possess their own unique written properties. …
