Wogan-Browne, Jocelyn.
Ruth Evans and Lesley Johnson, eds. Feminist Readings in Middle English Literature: The Wife of Bath and All Her Sect (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 165-94.
The early Middle English "Letter on Virginity" and the "Katherine Group" saints' lives critique male desire and the violation of female will, challenging conventions of courtly love. In WBP, SNT, and PhyT, Chaucer's use of "virginity material"…
Wood, Charles Roger.
Dissertation Abstracts International 55 (1994): 1572A.
Froissart's "Chroniques" have shaped subsequent perceptions of the uprising of 1381. Although Chaucer refers to it only once, his placement of the simile in NPT is significant. Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine took opposing eighteenth-century views. …
Yuasa, Nobuyuki.
Poetica: An International Journal of Linguistic Literary Studies 41 (1994): 59-83.
Comments on the names of selected characters, including the names of Chaucer's CT pilgrims and some of the characters in the tales. Compared with Spenser's and Shakespeare's names, "Chaucer's fictional names are rather limited in kind and number,"…
Andreas, James R.
Chaucer Review 29 (1994): 45-64.
Drawing from Geoffrey of Vinsauf and Mikhail Bakhtin on the "rhetoric of the utterance," Andreas stresses the importance of Chaucer's links between tales in the development of characters, authors, audience, and still more stories. The links exist in…
Madsen, Deborah L.
New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994.
Defines allegory by structural features of plot rather than by content, surveying theory and history of the genre from the classics to contemporary criticism. Briefly considers BD and PF as allegories.
Margherita Gayle.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994.
Six essays that treat literature as "another kind of history" by "problematizing the question of history both within and around medieval literature." Challenging historicist approaches, the essasy are deconstructive, psychoanalytic, and feminist,…
Bennett, Helen T.
Medieval Perspectives 9 (1994): 24-40.
Bennett artues that the pilgrimage frame of CT was influenced by Gregory's "Liber," particularly in presenting "a range of human types" and in suiting pastoral care to individual exigencies. The "Liber" has particular applications to Chaucer's…
Braswell, Mary Flowers.
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 16 (1994): 29-44.
Chaucer's office as Justice of the Peace necessitated his close familiarity with the forms and styles of court proceedings available to us in the records of the "Court Baron." Braswell notes in such records the frequency of figures similar to…
An "interactive" introduction to CT designed for classroom use. Provides for GP and select tales contextual materials from sources and analogues, rhetorical and visual traditions, and contemporary resources, guiding students in their considerations…
Collette, Carolyn P.
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. 127-47.
Collette examines the tradition of Mariology in relation to PrPT and SNPT. In their "Prologues," the Prioress and the Second Nun invoke the Virgin "as a figure of virtuous female power and speech." In their "Tales," however, women and children die…
Crane, Susan.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994.
Romance is the medieval genre that most clearly dramatizes gendered identity, focusing on "courtship, marriage, lineal concerns, primogeniture, and sexual maturation." Chaucer's KnT, WBT, SqT, FranT, and Th reflect and confront masculine identity…
Hanning, Robert W.
Jean E. Jost, ed. Chaucer's Humor: Critical Essays (New York and London: Garland, 1994), pp. 295-319.
Hanning examines the allusions to demons and devils in CT and compares them with the devil figure in late-medieval English religious drama. In both contexts, the devil is a tricker of humans who is tricked by God; a "spirit of inversion" who seeks…
Pigg, Daniel F.
Jean E. Jost, ed. Chaucer's Humor: Critical Essays (New York and London: Garland, 1994), pp. 321-48.
Pigg traces a pattern in the Ellesmere order of CT, beginning with how the narrators circumscribe the religious comedy of MLT and ClT by keeping their plots earthbound. PhyT is a "transitional ... refiguring" that leads to the more spiritual…
The ending of CT is intentionally ambiguous,leaving the choice of a final meaning--if there "is" one--to the reader. The most characteristically "Chaucerian" reading of the ending is also the most modern: to choose not to make a choice is to make…
Shynne, Gwanghyun.
Dissertation Abstracts International 54 (1994): 3046A.
Examines CT in light of medieval discourses on allegory and of modern theories (exegetical, deconstructive, Bakhtinian), considering framework, prologues, and tales, especially WBT,PardT, and CYT. Also discussed are ParsT, Ret, Th, MkT, FrT, SumT,…
Roney, Lois.
Liam O. Purdon and Cindy L. Vitto, eds. The Rusted Hauberk: Feudal Ideals of Order and Their Decline (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1994), pp. 268-98.
In Chaucer's three most noble, most feudal tales, the meaning of the characters' oaths is subjectively conditioned by their makers--reflecting a decline from the feudal ideal that oaths could be objectively understood. The subjectivity of oaths is…
Wimsatt, James I.
Leo Carruthers, ed. Heroes and Heroines in Medieval English Literature: A Festschrift Presented to Andre Crepin on the Occasion of His Sixty-Fifth Birthday (Woodbridge, Suffolk; and Rochester, N.Y.: D. S. Brewer, 1994), pp. 137-48.
In the prose "Tristan" and Malory's "Morte d'Arthur," no single knight embodies all attributes of the courtly ideal. Similarly, Chaucer's complete depiction of the idealized knight is created through the description of GP Knight in combination with…
Reviews critical opinion about the date on which the pilgrims started for Canterbury and concludes that it was Easter Saturday, 18 April 1394. The term "Ram" refers both to the constellation Aries (thus confirming the date) and to the sign Aries,…
Greenwood, Maria K.
Bulletin des Anglicistes Medievistes 45 (1994): 847-69.
Bakhtinian approach to the sketch of the Clerk: there is an intricate dialogue between the latter and the narrator. The facts behind the story and the way it is told reveal much about Chaucer's complex personality.
Boyd, Beverly.
Res Publica Litterarum: Studies in the Classical Tradition 17 (1994): 147-52.
Considers Emelye's prayer in KnT in light of both Boccaccio's "Teseida" and the fertility symbolism in Chaucer's tale, concluding that the prayer should be understood in terms of Diana's various mythological powers, while the answer should be…
Brewer, Derek.
Leo Carruthers, ed. Heroes and Heroines in Medieval English Literature: A Festschrift Presented to Andre Crepin on the Occasion of His Sixty-Fifth Birthday (Woodbridge, Suffolk; and Rochester, N.Y.: D. S. Brewer, 1994), pp. 81-96.
Like Peter of Cyprus, celebrated in Machaut's "Prise," Chaucer's Knight is a hero, his lists of battles showing him to be a Crusader-knight virtuous in devotion to duty. Chaucer deemed the knightly ideal possible in his contemporary world.
Strohm, Paul.
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. 163-76.
The language and imagery with which the Cook denounces Perkyn's revelry in CkT evoke the rhetoric with which contemporary writers denounced the so-called Peasants' Revolt of 1381. Perkyn's revelry may seem "innocuous" to readers today, but "the…
Hartman, Michael Oscar.
Dissertation Abstracts International 55 (1994): 559A-60A.
Although Old English poetry always depicts Satan as supernaturally powerful (while doctrinally powerless), late-Middle English works show him as comic, the boaster who must fail--as in the mystery cycles followed by the morality plays. In Chaucer's…
Carruthers, Mary J.
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. 93-106.
Carruthers explores the role of memory, one of the five divisions of classical rhetoric, in composing and understanding medieval poetry. Works such as "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" and Chaucer's KnT are "memory-friendly" because images…
