Kelly, Henry Ansgar.
Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1975.
Assesses the meaning and status of "courtly" love and its relation to marriage in medieval traditions and critical commentary on these traditions. Considers a wide range of medieval Latin and vernacular representations of love and marriage, and…
Lipton, Emma.
In The Open Access Companion to the Canterbury Tales. https://opencanterburytales.dsl.lsu.edu, 2017. Relocated 2025 at https://opencanterburytales.lsusites.org/
Explores how and to what extent the WBP "presents both the challenges to women's agency posed by medieval marriage and, conversely, the ways existing practices of medieval marriage could be manipulated to empower women." Designed for pedagogical use,…
Brewer, D[erek], S.
Modern Language Review 49 (1954): 461-64.
Challenges the critical "platitude" that love and marriage are incompatible in Chaucer. Identifies a number of instances in Chaucer's works where love and marriage clearly coincide, and argues that TC is only an "apparent exception" in this regard.…
Saunders, Corinne [J.]
Helen Cooney, ed. Writings on Love in the English Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), pp. 45-61.
Apart from Chaucer's works, most romances in Middle English "rewrite" their French and Latin analogues, representing the virtuous aspects of love rather than the conventions of the courtly game. Chaucer's writing exemplifies the "extremes of fin…
Bryson, Michael, and Arpi Movsesian.
[Cambridge]: Open Books, 2017.
Surveys depictions of love, from the Bible to English Renaissance literature, exploring poetic representations of love and the effects of efforts to sublimate or suppress it. The section on Chaucer (pp. 280-94), labeled "Post-Fin'amor English…
In the allusions to infernal sufferers in medieval poems, the lover and the miser are often linked: both have lost their rational capacity, and the sins of both proceed from cupidity. Hence, such reference in BD and TC show that the Black Knight…
Slaughter, Eugene E.
Essays in Honor of Walter Clyde Curry (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1954), pp. 61-76.
Explores parallels and tensions between earthly and heavenly love in TC, investigating how the theological "doctrine" of grace--inflected by ideas of merit, hope, and despair--is adapted to courtly, earthly conventions in the poem. Focuses on uses of…
Moser, Thomas C., Jr.
James M. Dean and Christian Zacher, eds. The Idea of Medieval Literature: New Essays on Chaucer and Medieval Culture in Honor of Donald R. Howard (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1992), pp. 243-64.
Analyzes a lyric with the invented title of "Inordinate Love Defined," which appears uniquely on the final leaf of a fifteenth-century manuscript, Copenhagen Thott 110, in the Royal Library. Also discusses briefly a lyric fragment of TC (1.400-406).
Gilles, Sealy.
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 25: 157-97, 2003.
Reads the depiction of Troilus's love-sickness against "new theories of contagion" that resulted from the devastations of the plague. Criseyde internalizes the anti-feminist "logic of disease" and names herself the "infective other." Troilus's…
Arveragus is a more fully developed character if we acknowledge his relatively low degree (compared with that of Dorigen). Class status also clarifies the teller's own status and his admiration for rhetoric.
Miliaras, Barbara.
Liana De Girolami Cheney, ed. Pre-Raphaelitism and Medievalism in the Arts. (Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen, 1992), pp. 127-57.
Burne-Jones's use of the grotesque was influenced by Chaucer, among others. In KnT, Emelye unwittingly inspires destructive passion in Palamon and Arcite, creating disorder in society and leading to a "grotesque denouement."
Buckler, Patricia Prandini.
JoAnna Stephens Mink and Janet Doubler Ward, eds. Joinings and Disjoinings: The Significance of Marital Status in Literature (Bowling Green Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1991), pp. 6-18.
Composed in the context of the bubonic plague, BD encourages rejection of despair.
Durham, Lonnie J.
Chaucer Review 3.1 (1968): 1-11.
Explores the imagery of nature and death in TC, arguing that Criseyde is "representative of a principle of life" and "best understood in terms of her cyclical or seasonal progression through the poem." Pandarus is associated with mutability, and…
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…
Beidler, Peter.
Studies in American Indian Literature 15 (2003): 92-103.
Comments on the possible influence of CT on the frame-tale structure of Erdrich's "Tales of Burning Love" and considers to what extent parallels between the Wife of Bath and Lulu Nanapush ("Love Medicine") indicate that Chaucer's work is a source for…
Summit, Jennifer.
Chicago and London : University of Chicago Press, 2000.
Historicizing the "commonplace" conception that women writers stand in opposition to literary tradition, Summit assesses how the conception itself "dialectically fashioned both 'the woman writer' and 'English literature' in the medieval and early…
Renevey, Denis, and Christiania Whitehead, eds.
Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2009.
Twenty-five essays by various authors on topics that pertain to translation in the Middle Ages and the translation of medieval literature; the volume includes an index that lists many references to Chaucer. For two essays that pertain to Chaucer,…
Influenced by the conventions of Renaissance Petrarchism, Jonathan Sidnam's seventeenth-century translation/paraphrase of TC suppresses Chaucer's intimations that his poem may be read by both men and women in a way that transcends gender. Observing…
Risden explores how several medieval narratives "subvert" readers' expectations and "hint at the loneliness of the moral act." Includes comments on WBP, as well as on "Beowulf," "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," "Piers Plowman," and other works.
Comic novel featuring literary detective Thursday Next, set in a world where reality and literature are permeable. Includes references to Chaucer, to discrepancies in CT, and to many works of fiction.
Barrington, Candace.
Kathleen Coyne Kelly and Tison Pugh, eds. Chaucer on Screen: Absence, Presence, and Adapting the "Canterbury Tales" (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2016), pp. 88-107.
Recounts efforts to find "film elements" (recorded vestiges) of "The Deadly Riddle," a 1956 television version of WBT, produced by Roy Huggins for "Warner Brothers Presents," starring Natalie Wood and Jacques Sernas. Only paratextual material…
