Stone, Gregory B.
Gregory B. Stone. The Death of the Troubadour: The Late Medieval Resistance to the Renaissance (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), pp. 143-98.
Deconstructs BD as an example of a work that resists the Renaissance impulses to individualism and the rise of narrative. In BD, lyricism is asserted by the failure of narrative to console, and individualism is undercut by recurrent verbal play on…
King, Laura Severt.
Dissertation Abstracts International 54 (1994): 3757A.
Among the handful of converted whores, Mary Magdalene is best known in late medieval writing through the homily "De maria Magdalena" (which Chaucer translated) and the Digby play. These works reveal remarkably literal physicality in which carnal…
Lee, Monika H.
Essays in Literature (Macomb, Ill.) 21 (1994): 152-65.
Like many other medieval English poets, Chaucer was much concerned with the nature of truth, especially in FranT and TC. The Late Middle Ages still showed a "vestigial orality" in approaching the subject.
Leland, John L.
Medieval Prosopography 15 (1994): 115-38.
Those compelled to abjure the court in 1388, while less well known than the companions of Richard II who faced charges of treason, can be studied collectively as typical members of Richard's court. They include an older group, friends of Richard's…
Lynch, Andrew.
Hilary Fraser and R. S. White, eds. Constructing Gender: Feminism in Literary Studies (Nedlands, West Australia: University of Western Australia Press, 1994), pp. 19-38.
When linked to issues of genre, the manner of constructing a female audience in FranT, LGW and Henryson's "Testament" may destabilize narrative closures and thereby offer moral intruction to women.
Lynch, Kathryn L.
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. 107-25.
From the dream visions through CT, Chaucer never abandoned his fascination with walls and "enclosed fictions." On the one hand, walls function metaphorically, representing such forces as the rise and fall of civilization. On the other, they create…
Maddox, Donald, and Sara Sturm-Maddox, eds.
Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1994.
Thirty-four essays in English and French by various hands, arranged under five categories: (1) Configuring the Feminine; (2) Lyric Voice, Poetic Style: From Troubadours to Rhetoriqueurs; (3) Amor: Ethos and Affect; (4) Fictions of Identity and…
Tschann, Judith.
Jean E. Jost, ed. Chaucer's Humor: Critical Essays (New York and London: Garland, 1994), pp. 349-78.
Like Ret, the farts in MiltT and SumT remake something for their recipients. On the highest level of abstraction, they combine to remake time from the "end" perspective of death.
Meale, Carol M., ed.
Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1994.
Twelve essays, by various authors, from the Third Conference on Romance in England, held March-April 1992 at the University of Bristol. Topics include generic definition; textual transmission; audience reception; romance and emergent nationalism;…
Countering the modern critical view of Chaucer as a nominalist or antirealist, Myles finds Chaucer a realist in many senses of the term: "a foundational realist, an epistemological realist, an ethical realist, a semiotic and linguistic realist, and…
Pask, Albert Kevin.
Dissertation Abstracts International 55 (1994): 578A.
Pask develops a distinct genre from Foucault's formulation of an "author-function": the life-and-works narratives that emerge in the historical perceptions of readers of Chaucer, Sidney, Spenser, and Donne.
Paxson, James J.
Cambridge: Cambridge University PRess, 1994.
Defines and analyzes personification as fundamental to literature and human consciousness. Surveys the history and theory of the device and examines its roles in works by Prudentius, Chaucer, Langland, and Spenser, applying various modern critical…
Pinti, Daniel J.
Translation Review 44-45 (1994): 16-23.
Examines Gavin Douglas's "Eneados" as a work in which Mikhail Bakhtin's notions of diologism and heteroglossia help illuminate medieval translation practice. Encourages application of such an approach to medieval translators, including Chaucer.
Although often glossed erroneously as "hypocritical," the word "spiced," as applied to the Parson's conscience, indicates an individual whose soul is touched suddenly and profoundly by religion, "as spices might do the palate."
Owen, Charles A., Jr.
Medium AEvum 63 (1994): 239-49.
Although most critics agree that Chaucer intended ParsT and Ret to conclude CT, early manuscript history indicates that ParsT may have been an independent work, a "Treatise on Patience," for which Ret would serve as a fitting conclusion.
Cecilia is a humanist who represents the changing medieval world view. Her religion is personal rather than evangelical and is grounded in the practical. She does not perform miracles, nor do any supernatural powers vanquish her enemies or save her…
Purdon, Liam O., and Cindy L. Vitto, eds.
Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1994.
Twelve essays examine the decline of the feudal ideal, an ideal that may never have existed in practice. Exploring interactions between literature and sociohistorical data, contributors outline various gaps between feudal ideals and realities: …
Sabadash, Deborah Margaret.
Dissertation Abstracts International 55 (1994): 561A.
Expands Ernst Curtius's world-upsidedown topos through Bakhtinian theories of textual dialogue and the carnivalesque to reveal the rich variety of a wide sampling of medieval texts, including CT.
Scanlon, Larry.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Late-medieval English exempla and exemplum collections have political and ideological significance. Vernacular exempla are "narrative enactment(s) of cultural authority" that appropriate the authority of exemplary sermons and imitate the political…
Chaucer's accounts of women who write and read letters in TC, MerT, and MLT reveal female privacy and autonomy to be sites of profound anxiety concerning the control of domestic space, women's actions, and women's bodies.
Taylor, Paul Beekman.
Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 95 (1994): 243-48.
Chaucer's use of the name Geffrey in his poetry contains a humorous and self-reflexive impact, although reference to his ancestral name Malyn does not.
Winick, Stephen D.
Proverbium: Yearbook of International Proverb Scholarship 11 (1994): 259-81.
Challenges B. J. Whiting's (1934) intuitive definition of proverbs and offers an ethnographic definition, focusing on "strategies" of performance of the proverbs in CT and TC and the utility of proverbs in effecting "normalization, valorization, and…
