Barney, Stephen A.
Kathleen M. Hewett-Smith, ed. William Langland's Piers Plowman: A Book of Essays (New York and London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 103-17.
Compares paired samples of Langland's and Chaucer's verse to argue that Langland's are superior in both sound and sense.
Argues that Troilus "establishes the meaning of the events" in TC by "contemplating and exposing" their inner significance. His thoughts convey the "theme of bondage" through the imagery and language of constraint (prison and confinement, snares and…
Barney, Stephen A.
Dewey R. Faulkner, ed. Twentieth Century Interpretations of The Pardoner's Tale: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1973), pp. 83-95.
Commends the "harmony" of PardT and "its capacities to elicit responses," discussing it as a tale that is "eloquent," intelligent, significantly expressive, unified, and instructive." Includes contrasts with PhyT.
Barney, Stephen A., ed.
Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1980.
Contains seventeen essays or excerpts from longer works by various authors, fourteen previously published, some with very brief additional "afterwords." For the three newly-published pieces, search for Chaucer's Troilus: Essays in Criticism under…
Text of TC based on Riverside edition, with Boccaccio's "Il Filostrato" on facing pages, in the English translation of Robert P. apRoberts and Anna Bruni Benson. Includes Henryson's Testament of Cresseid, as edited by Robert L. Kindrick; ten…
Baron, F. Xavier.
Journal of Psychohistory 7.1 (1979): 77-103.
Because Chaucer's "children's tales" deal with "extreme violence which the children suffer as innocent victims," these narratives "tend toward despair." Yet, they provoke compassion and thereby suggest that compassion is the proper response to…
Baron, F. Xavier.
Papers on Language and Literature 10 (1974): 5-14.
Considers Troilus's "altruistic love" of Criseyde to be one of the "outstanding examples in late medieval romance" of "self-abnegating love," i.e., "placing another's good before one's own." Troilus's hesitancy to act is a manifestation of this…
Baroodes, Benjamin S. W.
Neophilologus 98.03 (2014): 495-508.
Not just a pun on beef and burping, "buf" derives from French "buffer," which refers to puffing up one's cheeks and, later, to being stuffed with food.
Barootes, B. S. W.
In Jamie C. Fumo, ed. Chaucer's "Book of the Duchess": Contexts and Interpretations (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2018), pp. 29-50.
Considers the relations between BD and fourteenth-century devotional texts, particularly "Cursor mundi," that disparage "fable" as a form of idleness. Rejecting the popular association between consuming fiction and playing idle games, BD reclaims…
Barootes, B. S. W.
Chaucer Review 53.1 (2018): 102-11.
Examines the use of final -"e" in the fourth stanza of Book II of TC, and the ways in which early copyists paid attention to Chaucer's use of the letter.
Barootes, Benjamin S. W.
Open access Ph.D. dissertation. McGill University, 2016.
Available at https://escholarship.mcgill.ca/.
Accessed February 7, 2021.
Examines "how Middle English poets deployed the dream vision genre and the elegiac mode to explore the limitations of language and interrogate the art of poetry." Includes discussion of how in BD the Black Knight's "move from the closed circle of…
Barr, Helen.
Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2001.
Seven interrelated studies and an afterword that explore "socioliterary practice," considering literature as a material form of social behavior in "internal and dialectical relationship" with the institutions and conventions that shape it and that it…
The GP description of the Knight engages late-medieval questions of war and pacifism, confronting the audience with an "ethical and political dilemma."
Both PrP and PrT express "affective devotional piety," while simultaneously they are "swollen with reference to targets of Wycliffite polemic." As a result, their Marian generic affiliations and the "collocational patterns" of their diction can and…
Barr, Helen.
Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014.
Combines traditional literary Chaucerian scholarship with innovative ways of looking at the material culture of medieval texts and early modern drama. Focuses on how Chaucer plays with time, "temporal circularity," and textual history. Includes…
Argues that Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" alludes to KnT (particularly the figures of Emelye and Arcite) in ways that "perforate the boundaries" of the chronology of Shakespeare's borrowings the from the tale in "Dream" and in "The Two…
Barr, Helen.
Bonnie Lander-Johnson and Eleanor Decamp, eds. Blood Matters: Studies in European Literature and Thought, 1400-1700 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), pp. 238-48.
Describes the iconography of Thomas Becket's blood in Canterbury Cathedral and its "Christomimetic" associations, and explores parallels between Becket's blood and the Pardoner's blood in the "Canterbury Interlude" that precedes the "Tale of Beryn,"…
Barr, Helen.
Rachel Stenner, Tamsin Badcoe, and Gareth Griffith, eds. Rereading Chaucer and Spenser: Dan Geffrey with the New Poete (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019), pp. 37-59.
Close reading of lines 33-41 (and E. K.'s commentary) of the February eclogue of Spenser's "Shepheardes Calender" exemplifies the "truancy of literary resonance" and discloses resonant intertextual play among the comic variety of HF, the monovocality…
Barr, Jane.
Julia Bolton Holloway, Constance S. Wright, and Joan Bechtold, eds. Equally in God's Image: Women in the Middle Ages (New York: Peter Lang, 1990), pp. 122-28.
The Wife of Bath tells us that she acquired forbidden learning through forbidden sex with university students, breaking the barriers of both literacy and celibacy, as reflected in her challenge to Pauline epistles and Jerome's Vulgate.
Explores how the concern with vision as a way of knowing is a concern in a variety of medieval dream visions, including "Pearl," "Piers Plowman," and HF.
Barr, Jessica.
Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2010.
In chapter 7, "Discrediting the Vision: The House of Fame" (pp. 184-207), Barr argues that HF portrays an active, unreliable visionary, one who unsuccessfully employs cognitive faculties to try to understand the contents of divinely granted vision.…
