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…
Diamond, Arlyn.
Carol M. Meale, ed. Readings in Medieval English Romance (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1994), pp. 65-81.
Examines the intersection of gender, genre, and history in "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" and KnT to argue that "the inversion or refusal of generic conventions, enabled by the self-conscious use of a rich tradition of courtly narratives, points…
Harley, Marta Powell.
Elizabeth T. Hayes, ed. Images of Persephone: Feminist Readings in Western Literature (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1994), pp. 20-32.
In alluding to the triple goddess Diana-Lucina-Prosperina to characterize Emily in KnT and May in MerT, Chaucer "simultaneously represents female assertiveness ... and vulnerability." However, he allows the potential to depict female pain to…
Jost, Jean E.
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. 49-76.
Chaucer's primary representatives of aristocracy, the Knight and the Squire, reveal differing assumptions about acting within their social stations. Both exhibit confidence through linguistic security, but the Knight's epic reality and narrative…
Noguchi, Shunichi.
Poetica: An International Journal of Linguistic Literary Studies 41 (1994): 45-50.
Compared with their Boccaccian originals, the prayers in Chaucer's KnT are more symmetrical and more concerned with promises to perform duty or to offer sacrifice.
The discourse of KnT displays the Knight's ideological desire to construct a boundary between a stable Christian cosmos and the restless eros of unregulated taletelling by establishing a political and narrative paradigm for the other pilgrims to…
Proposes that "upon the viritoot," often glossed as "to be astir," actually means "fairy toot," a common topological expression from England. This second meaning suggests that Gervase the smith, speculating on why the angry Absolon has appeared to…
Calabrese, Michael (A.)
English Language Notes 32:1 (1994): 13-18.
Edward Schweitzer has linked the scene of Absolon's kissing the "naked ers" with medieval medical cures of lovesickness. However, the episode may also draw on Ovid's proposal in "Remedia Amoris" that desperate lovers may be cured by witnessing the…
Dane, Joseph A.
English Language Notes 31:4 (1994): 10-19.
Chaucer's phrase is traditionally interpreted, "Yet for all the oxen in my plough, I would not take upon me more than enough (i.e., be overly suspicious)." A more accurate reading, however, is "I would not take upon me more than the oxen in my…
Leicester, H. Marshall, Jr.
ELH 61 (1994): 473-99.
With its richness subverting fabliau conventions, MilT glitters with multiple significations. Alison, the central figure, is both sexy and presexual, both Medusa and "bryd" (in multiple and homonymous senses). Unlike the traditional old cuckold,…
Through the character of John the Carpenter, Chaucer parodies not the mystery plays but their credulous audiences, who conflated past and present and often confused illusion with reality.
Woods, William F.
Chaucer Review 29 (1994): 166-78.
In MilT, the house and the space around it symbolize both the tale itself and the principal characters. The top floor represents the "heavenly" sphere where the flood is predicted and awaited; the middle, or "earthly," level is Alison's bedroom; and…
The fact that Chauntecleer defies his dream and still escapes harm "raises serious questions about the validity of dream interpretation, leaving the reader with a sense that dreams mean whatever we want them to."
Beidler, Peter G.
Chaucer Review 28 (1994): 237-51.
Chaucer's RvT contains sufficient close parallels with Boccaccio's story of Pinuccio and Niccolosa to suggest that the latter might have been a source for the former. Two German versions of the cradle-trick story, although more similar in general…
Smith, Jeremy (J.)
Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 95 (1994): 433-37.
Some northernisms in RvT have been dismissed as quasi-northern or as scribal misreadings. However, these forms are genuine attempts by post-Shift southern scribes to reflect a pre-Shift northern pronunciation.
The "whit thyng" the miller's wife sees in the dark bedroom is not the clerk's nightcap. Instead, the term is taken from medieval philosophy, wherein objects are first judged by color. On closer inspection, they become human and take form. The…
Bracken, Christopher.
Critical Matrix: The Princeton Journal of Women, Gender, and Culture 8:1 (1994): 13-39.
Cast as a discussion among four participants (Reductio, Thea, Ceres, and Cassandra), this closet drama explores relations among power, gender, trade, religion, and their representation in MLT. The characters are, loosely, representatives of…
Dor, Juliette.
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. 71-80.
The suffering of Custance in MLT echoes Innocent III's description of human life in his "De miseria condicionis humane"; the tale's end, which indicates that Custance's humility will ultimately be rewarded, draws from the pseudosource of the…
Harty, Kevin J.
Studies in Short Fiction 31 (1994): 489-90.
Although other allusions to the liturgy of Holy Week have been found in MLT, an allusion previously unnoted occurs when Constance is set adrift with her infant son, another instance of Chaucer's adding to the pathos of Constance's situation.
Pelen, Marc M.
Papers on Language and Literature 30 (1994): 132-56.
The narratives of Trevet and Gower turn the story of Constance into a secular moral fable. Similarly, "the Man of Law exposes himself to Chaucer's irony ...: it is this transcendent freedom from the moral content of the legend that the Man of Law…
