Johanson, Paula.
Berkeley Heights, N.J.: Enslow, 2010.
Introductory commentary on British poetry from Anglo-Saxon poetry to the works of John Keats, focusing on canonical works and writers. Chapter 2 (pp. 21-30) summarizes Chaucer's life and describes his iambic meter, explicating Truth (original and…
John, Lilse C.
Notes and Queries 201 (1956): 97-98.
Seeks advice in understanding the phrase "Chaucer's borrow" which appears Sir Nicholas H. Nicholas's "Memoirs of the Life and Times of Sir Christopher Hatton" (1847), where it is quoted from a letter to Hatton from William Dodington. Clarifies the…
The mayor of London reviews the history of London from the Celts to the present, organizing each developmental period around an historical person. The chapter on the later Middle Ages features Chaucer's connection to London, including his dwelling in…
Johnson, Bruce A.
David G. Allen and Robert A. White, eds. Subjects on the World's Stage: Essays on British Literature of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1995), pp.54-61.
The geographic references in PardT, of which the stile is the central figure, represent a loosely symbolic, "moral" landscape that adds to the moral tone of the tale.
Johnson, David F., and Elaine Treharne, eds.
Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2005.
Twenty-five essays by various contributors, addressing individual works or genres and designed for "students undertaking courses in Old and Middle English." The book includes recurrent references to Chaucer's works. For two essays that pertain to his…
Altough the behavior of Alisoun and the knight of WBT counters the teachings of the medieval church, such behavior exemplifies a Christian attitude toward love and marriage.
Considers the alternation between the pedagogy of argument (prose sections) and pleasure (metrical sections) in "prosimetrum," arguing that the form of Boethius's "Consolation" was as essential as its content for writers such as Chaucer, Usk,…
Boethius's "prosimetrum" lets readers experience the "consolation of temporality" that Philosophy offers. In Bo, Chaucer demonstrates his understanding of this consolation by highlighting Philosophy's references to time; however, by rendering the…
Johnson, Eleanor.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013.
Examines fiction's role in shaping readers' ethics: the transformation of the narrator encourages and mirrors the transformation of the reader (protrepsis). Discusses medieval texts that theorize themselves and teach the reader how to read, positing…
Johnson, Eleanor.
Journal of English and Germanic Philology 114, no. 4 (2015): 504-25.
Argues that the Man of Law depicts himself as a traditionalist in law. Through his presentation in GP, his conversation with the Host, and his Tale, the Man of Law separates himself from negative views of lawyers in the wake of the 1381 Rising. In…
Johnson, Eleanor.
Jenny Adams and Nancy Mason Bradbury, eds. Medieval Women and Their Objects (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017), pp. 201-28.
Discusses Chaucer's thematic thread of accessibility of legal rights to women in FranT and PhyT. Dorigen, in FranT, and Virginia, in PhyT, are women trapped as objects of medieval law, or as properties whose control or outright ownership is the…
Describes several ways of addressing modern "experimental poems 'as' criticism," and suggests that, adumbrating such metapoetic practice, the juxtaposition of Th and Mel "constitutes a wondering literary-theoretical response to Boethius'…
Johnson, Eleanor.
In Thomas A. Prendergast and Jessica Rosenfeld, eds. Chaucer and the Subversion of Form (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 61-82.
Argues that HF, like Virginia Woolf's "To the Lighthouse" and Lyn Hejinian's "My Life," rejects a "hermeneutic of linear causality." Both Chaucer and the postmedieval authors develop the potential of the dream-vision form to advance a "literary…
Johnson, Eleanor.
A. Joseph McMullen and Erica Weaver, eds. The Legacy of Boethius in Medieval England: The "Consolation" and Its Afterlives (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2018.), pp. 125-42.
Explores the rational power of prose and the affective power of poetry to effect ethical transformation in Boethius's "Consolation of Philosophy," linking the work's prosimetric alteration with its theme of providential causation, and arguing that…
Johnson, Eleanor.
Suzanne Conklin Akbari and James Simpson, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Chaucer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), pp. 426-39.
Discusses the "the rise and coalescence of trespass law, both as a theory of legal relationality and a practice of litigation." Traces the effect of trespass law on other forms of English law and demonstrates the effect of this law on poetry.…
Johnson, Eleanor.
Eleanor Johnson. Waste and the Wasters: Poetry and Ecosystemic Thought in Medieval England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2023), pp. 102-25.
Reads CYP in the context of late medieval English concerns about waste as "ecosystemic misconduct par excellence," linking to the plague the Canon's Yeoman's social contagion and the damage done to him by his working environment. Explicates the…
Johnson, Hannah.
Holly A. Crocker and D. Vance Smith, eds. Medieval Literature: Criticism and Debates (New York; Routledge, 2014), pp. 192-200.
Responds to two critical analyses of PrT by Aranye Fradenburg and Lee Patterson, which highlight "methodological and ethical concerns" with historical analysis of the Tale. Promotes the need to "theorize and historicize" in order to gain deeper…
Combines neighbor theory with Pauline notions of debt, payment, and the "dual commandment" to love God and neighbor, exploring usury, neighborly obligation, Christian-Jewish proximity, and market economy in "The Childe of Bristowe" and PrT--found…
Johnson, Ian, ed.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019.
Includes fifty brief essays that offer "historical and conceptual information and perspectives" to aid in understanding Chaucer's works: J. A. Burrow, "What Was Chaucer Like?"; Andrew Galloway, "Chaucer's Life and Literary 'Profession'"; Jeremy J.…
Johnson, Ian.
A. J. Minnis, ed. The Medieval Boethius (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1987), pp. 139-68.
In bk. 3, met. 12, of his popular English translation of Boethius, John Walton behaves like a poet-commentator, striving for a contemporary eloquence while drawing on the authority of commentary tradition. In his preface, assuming the role of a…
Johnson, Ian.
Maarten J. F. M. Hoenen and Lodi Nauta, eds. Boethius in the Middle Ages: Latin and Vernacular Tradition of the 'Consolatio Philosophiae' (Leiden, New York, and Koln: Brill, 1997), pp. 217-42.
Helps clarify the place and meaning of John Walton's translation of Boethius's "Consolatio Philosophiae" (1410) by contrasting it with Chaucer's Bo.
