Browse Items (16400 total)

Fries, Maureen.   John F. Plummer, ed. Vox Feminae: Studies in Medieval Woman's Songs (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute, Western Michigan University, 1981), pp. 155-78.
The vernacular "woman's song" focuses passively on the beloved (not the speaker's feelings), powerless to control the beloved. Such features serve as a context to analyze the "comic sex- and/or class-role reversal" in RvT, MerT, and Antigone's Song…

Bell, Adrian R.   John France, ed. Mercenaries and Paid Men: The Mercenary Identity in the Middle Ages. Proceedings of a Conference Held at University of Wales, Swansea, 7th-9th July 2005. Smithsonian History of Warfare, no. 47 (Leiden: Brill, 2008), pp. 301-15.
Bell analyzes the military record of 5,600 soldiers from Chaucer's lifetime to discover how many had records of military service similar to the experience of Chaucer's Knight. It was not uncommon for English soldiers to serve as mercenaries in…

Ito, Masayoshi.   John Gower, The Medieval Poet (Tokyo: Shinozaki Shorin, 1976), pp. 101-18.
Compares Gower's art and skill in using rhyme royal stanzas with Chaucer's, arguing that Chaucer's are superior and more flexibly adapted to narrative, largely because the "fetters of the ballade stanza" constrain Gower's dexterity. Originally…

Ito, Masayoshi.   John Gower, The Medieval Poet (Tokyo: Shinozaki Shorin, 1976), pp. 25-38.
Compares the aesthetic virtues and limitations of MLT in comparison with Gower's Tale of Constance, observing how Gower's account is more proportionate than Chaucer’s, even though the latter exhibits more complex characterization, humor, and…

Ito, Masayoshi.   John Gower, The Medieval Poet (Tokyo: Shinozaki Shorin, 1976), pp. 39-59.
Compares and contrasts the style, characterization, sentiment, and structure of nine narratives of shared subject matter among Chaucer's and Gower's works. Concludes that Gower's are superior in formal features, "such as balance and unity," but that…

Ito, Masayoshi.   John Gower, The Medieval Poet (Tokyo: Shinozaki Shorin, 1976), pp. 80-100.
Explores Gower's development of his Tale of Jason and Medea in light of its sources and multiple analogues, emphasizing its success as a "beautiful love story." Includes points of comparison with Chaucer's version in LGW. Originally published in…

Cartwright, John [H].   John H. Cartwright and Brian Baker, eds. Literature and Science: Social Impact and Interaction (Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-CLIO, 2005), pp. 1-29.
Summarizes "Aristotelian cosmology" and describes its role as a structural and thematic device in Dante's "Paradiso." Describes the roles of astrology, the humours, and alchemy in Chaucer's CT, especially in the description of the Physician and in…

Boulger, James D.   John H. Dorenkamp, ed. Literary Studies: Essays in Memory of Francis A. Drumm ([Worchester, Mass.]: College of the Holy Cross, 1973), pp. 13-32.
Reads the NPT as a reflection of its narrator's moral sentiment, suggesting that the Nun's Priest is an intellectual, neither a stern moralist nor a modern relativist; he is a man content with "aesthetic contemplation" of the "world's failings."

Ackerman, Robert W.   John H. Fisher, ed. The Medieval Literature of Western Europe: A Review of Research, Mainly 1930-1960 (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1966), pp. 110-22.
Discursive bibliography of Chaucer studies (ca. 1930-1960), with five sub-sections: Bibliographies, Editions, and the Chaucer Canon; Chaucer's Life and Times; Chaucer's English; General Critical Works; The Canterbury Tales; and Troilus and Criseyde…

Hines, John.   John Hines. Voices in the Past: English Literature and Archaeology (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2004), pp. 105-36.
Discusses the use of space and physical objects in TC, arguing that the poem's movements among exterior and interior spaces reveal how characters manipulate such spaces--and even furniture--to negotiate relationships with one another and to chart…

Lewis, Lucy.   John Hinks and Catherine Armstrong, eds. Printing Places: Locations of Book Production & Distribution Since 1500 (Newcastle, Del.: Oak Knoll; London: British Library, 2005), pp. 1-14.
Lewis assesses challenges confronted by printer Thomas Richard when, in 1525, he produced John Walton's translation of Boethius's "Consolation of Philosophy," especially those challenges that resulted from interspersing intermittent commentary in a…

Coghill, N. K.   John Lawlor, ed. Patterns of Love and Courtesy: Essays in Memory of C. S. Lewis (London: Edward Arnold, 1966), pp. 141-56.
Explores the attitude toward sexual love expressed in Andreas Capellanus's "De Arte Honeste Amandi," contrasting it with the "innocent sincerity in sexual love" that is characteristic of Chaucer's Troilus (and Shakespeare's), also considering the…

Brewer, D. S.   John Lawlor, ed. Patterns of Love and Courtesy: Essays in Memory of C. S. Lewis (London: Edward Arnold, 1966), pp. 54-85.
Examines the meaning and significance of "courtesy" in the works of the "Gawain"-poet, and includes comments on characterization (as a matter of role rather than personality) in Chaucer's works, along with an excursus on "hende" that focuses on…

Salter, Elizabeth.   John Lawlor, ed. Patterns of Love and Courtesy: Essays in Memory of C. S. Lewis (London: Edward Arnold, 1966), pp. 86-106.
Interprets the discontinuities and disunities of TC for the ways that they reveal the "growth and release" of Chaucer's creative imagination, reading them as evidence of his "dissatisfaction" with the characterization of Criseyde and the nature of…

Legassie, Shayne Aaron.   John M. Ganim and Shayne Aaron Legassie, eds. Cosmopolitanism and the Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 181-205.
Compares cosmopolitanism in Trevet, Gower, and Chaucer's Constance legends. Establishes that Chaucer's sultan in MLT represents more of an aesthetic cosmopolitan than do his analogues in Trevet and Gower, who portray cosmopolitanism as a means of…

Sigal, Gale.   John M. Hill and Deborah M. Sinnreich-Levi, eds. The Rhetorical Poetics of the Middle Ages: Reconstructive Polyphony. Essays in Honor of Robert O. Payne (Madison, N.J., and London: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press and Associated University Presses, 2000 ), pp. 221-40.
The twelfth-century alba genre offered a more flexible paradigm for gender roles than critics have realized, a flexibility that Chaucer, in his appropriation of the alba in TC, continues and capitalizes on as he highlights the lovers' differences in…

Martin, Ellen E.   John M. Hill and Deborah M. Sinnreich-Levi, eds. The Rhetorical Poetics of the Middle Ages: Reconstructive Polyphony. Essays in Honor of Robert O. Payne (Madison, N.J., and London: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press and Associated University Presses, 2000), pp. 106-29.
Examines the relationships between (mis)reading and (mis)writing, exegesis, and the unconscious in HF.

Stevens, Martin.   John M. Hill and Deborah M. Sinnreich-Levi, eds. The Rhetorical Poetics of the Middle Ages: Reconstructive Polyphony. Essays in Honor of Robert O. Payne (Madison, N.J., and London: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press and Associated University Presses, 2000), pp. 130-48.
Th, MkT, and SqT are "double-voiced"; they reveal CT's central concerns with "narratological competence" and Chaucer's self-awareness about his storytelling.

McClellan, William.   John M. Hill and Deborah M. Sinnreich-Levi, eds. The Rhetorical Poetics of the Middle Ages: Reconstructive Polyphony. Essays in Honor of Robert O. Payne (Madison, N.J., and London: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press and Associated University Presses, 2000), pp. 149-63.
The Clerk's polemical stance in relation to Petrarch in ClP differentiates the Clerk's voice, rhetorical style, and ideology from Petrarch's, thus allowing for the introduction of dialogic discourse in the Tale itself.

Kimmelman, Burt.   John M. Hill and Deborah M. Sinnreich-Levi, eds. The Rhetorical Poetics of the Middle Ages: Reconstructive Polyphony. Essays in Honor of Robert O. Payne (Madison, N.J., and London: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press and Associated University Presses, 2000), pp. 177-205.
Chaucer's narrative persona is related to the Ockhamist controversy in that his narrator struggles with questions of experience and authoritative knowledge and of whether experience can convey truth. Particularly in Chaucer's dream-vision poems,…

Owen, Charles A. (Jr.)   John M. Hill and Deborah M. Sinnreich-Levi, eds. The Rhetorical Poetics of the Middle Ages: Reconstructive Polyphony. Essays in Honor of Robert O. Payne (Madison, N.J., and London: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press and Associated University Presses, 2000), pp. 45-66.
Compares and contrasts BD with French sources and analogues and emphasizes the degree to which BD "foreshadows" elements in Chaucer's later works, especially in its reliance on implicit meanings and narrative distance.

Carruthers, Mary [J.]   John M. Hill and Deborah M. Sinnreich-Levi, eds. The Rhetorical Poetics of the Middle Ages: Reconstructive Polyphony. Essays in Honor of Robert O. Payne (Madison, N.J., and London: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press and Associated University Presses, 2000), pp. 67-87.
Medieval memory is inherently social and constructive, playing a central role in the process of composition and thus BD is best understood in the context not of psychology but of rhetoric, as an "act of public mourning, of public remembering."

Feimer, Joel.   John M. Hill and Deborah M. Sinnreich-Levi, eds. The Rhetorical Poetics of the Middle Ages: Reconstructive Polyphony. Essays in Honor of Robert O. Payne (Madison, N.J., and London: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press and Associated University Presses, 2000), pp. 88-105.
Although the narrator's intention in LGW is to praise his heroines for their "trouthe in love," his naiveté leads to an ironic representation of feminine ideals and, ultimately, an underlying antifeminism.

Lynch, Kathryn L.   John M. Hill, Bonnie Wheeler, and R. F. Yeager, eds. Essays on Aesthetics and Medieval Literature in Honor of Howell Chickering (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 2014), pp. 115-28.
Explores metaphors of eating, drinking, hunting, and food preparation, within the framework of the "storytelling performances" of the Wife of Bath in WBT and the unnamed Wife in ShT.

Fyler, John M.   John M. Hill, Bonnie Wheeler, and R. F. Yeager, eds. Essays on Aesthetics and Medieval Literature in Honor of Howell Chickering (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 2014), pp. 129-41.
Examines plot and language repetition and "doublings" in CT. Focuses on irony and ambiguity in Th-MelL and claims that both tales have an "identical sentence" and are "the same story told twice. Also discusses MkT, NPT, and PrT.
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