Jost, Jean [E.]
Albrecht Classen, ed. Words of Love and Love of Words in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2008), pp. 395-420.
Courtly literature is an intellectual battleground in which reversals of gender and social positions clash. The men's rhetorical competition in FranT shows a courtly love of words.
Jost, Jean E.
Medieval Perspectives 1 (1986): 75-88.
Chaucer uses a medieval commonplace--vowing--as a function of genre: tragedy, comedy, or fabliau. In PardT, fashioning an illegitimate triple vow to eradicate Death, and bound by sworn brotherhood, three hoodlums effect upon themselves a grim,…
Jost, Jean E.
Fifteenth-Century Studies 21 (1994): 133-48.
"Beryn" lacks several typical Chaucerian characteristics: a "courtly demeanor and value system," idealism, verbal wit, and sophisticated characterization. Neither prologue nor tale rises above slapstick or the "mundane reality of life."
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…
Jost, Jean E.
Steven H. Gale, ed. Encyclopedia of British Humorists: Geoffrey Chaucer to John Cleese (New York and London: Garland, 1996): vol. 1, pp. 228-43.
Surveys the humor and structural comedy of Chaucer's works, especially CT, examining individual tales and commenting on BD, HF, and PF. Chaucer achieves comic effects through narrative resolution and by manipulating time, place, and circumstances. …
Jost, Jean E.
Peter G. Beidler, ed. Masculinities in Chaucer: Approaches to Maleness in the Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde (Cambridge; and Rochester, N.Y.: D. S. Brewer, 1998), pp. 77-90.
Analyzes the fraternal and potentially sexual attraction between the Friar and the Summoner by focusing on Chaucer's conception of brotherhood and the male relationships in FrPT and SumPT.
Jost, Jean E.
Albrecht Classen, ed. The Book and the Magic of Reading in the Middle Ages. (New York and London: Garland, 1998), pp. 171-217.
Chaucer involves his readers in a romancelike quest of introspection. By way of infinite regression, they encounter first the text, then a reading character, and finally themselves. The process encourages both Socratic self-knowledge and pleasurable…
Jost, Jean E.
Publications of the Medieval Association of the Midwest 7: 108-25, 2000.
Characterizes the Prioress of GP and PrT as "psychologically androgynous," a combination of "feminine on the outside" and "masculine on the inside." This combination is evident in the Prioress's fusion of sentimentality and cruelty and her other…
Jost, Jean E.
Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Teaching 8.1: 61-69, 2000.
Recommends a learning-centered approach to teaching CT in which students collaborate to produce a creative imitation of Chaucer's work. Description of college-level assignment included.
Jost, Jean E.
Cindy L. Vitto and Marcia Smith Marzec, eds. New Perspectives on Criseyde (Fairview, N.C.: Pegasus Press, 2004), pp. 207-30
Jost applies performance theory to key points in the narrative at which Criseyde seems to manipulate her words and her behavior self-consciously to achieve a desired effect.
Jost, Jean E.
Albrecht Classen, ed. Discourses on Love, Marriage, and Transgression in Medieval and Early Modern Literature. (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2004), pp. 267-87.
Explores vows and vow-breaking in CT, arguing that ManT brings to tragic crescendo a concern with the transgression of marital vows and presents consequences as horrific as any in Greek drama.
Jost, Jean E.
Medieval Perspectives 2 (1987): 73-80.
Reads MLT and CYT as opposed tales. Custance of MLT is a "worthy victim" of the broken promises of others and someone who "steadfastly" keeps her own. CYPT, on the other hand, is "marked by changeability, mutability, and vacillation"; its characters…
Jost, Jean E.
Albrecht Classen, ed. Sexuality in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times: New Approaches to a Fundamental Cultural-Historical and Literary-Anthropological Theme (New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2008), pp. 599-632.
Contrasts Chaucer's Troilus and the title character of "Sir Tristrem," with comments on brutality and violence in "Athelston," exploring the "nobility" or lack of nobility of masculine protagonists in courtly romance. Devotion and affection dominate…
Jost, Jean E.
Parentheses: Papers in Medieval Studies 1 (1999): 53-82. [Web publication.]
In PF Chaucer deconstructs antifeminist courtly conventions and appropriates power for women. The poem challenges the views of woman promulgated by courtly love by alluding to contemporary political events (marriage of Anne of Bohemia) and by…
Jost, Jean E.
Medieval Perspectives 28 (2013): 145-82,
Though medieval orthodoxy insisted on the reality of free will, TC presents three characters subject to fortune at every turn, perhaps because they are pre-Christian pagans. Troilus is a victim of fortune from the moment he sees Criseyde. Pandarus…
Jost, Jean E.
Albrecht Classen, ed. Death in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times: The Material and Spiritual Conditions of the Culture of Death (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016), pp. 193-237.
Discusses Chaucer's awareness of the plague and reference to it in his works, especially PardT.
Jost, Jean E.,ed.
New York and London: Garland, 1994.
Nineteen essays by various hands, plus an introduction. Nine of the pieces are previously published works or excerpts by Howard Patch, G. K. Chesterton, Paul G. Ruggiers, Thomas A. Garbaty, Derek Pearsall, Alfred David, Alan T. Gaylord, A. Booker…
Considers the protagonists of ClT and Lars von Trier's film "Breaking the Waves," exploring how the audience's experiences of the "weird realism" of Griselda and Bess may be seen to induce a "heightened mode of encounter with the traces of a…
Joy, Eileen A., Myra J. Seaman, Kimberly K. Bell, and Mary K. Ramsey, eds.
New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
Ten essays by various authors, along with a foreword, an introduction, an "otherword," and an afterword. Topics range from high to low culture and explore relationships between reality and performance, including comparisons of medieval literature to…
Rejects the traditional three-part structure of HF and assesses the "structural function of its two juxtaposed narratives," i.e., the summary of Virgil's "Aeneid" and the journey, considering the poem's relation with Dante's "Divine Comedy, the…
Joyner, William.
Papers on Language and Literature 12 (1976): 3-19.
The juxtaposed stories of Aeneas and the dreamer are linked by parallel plots, by the segmentation of narrative units, and by verbal elements like the repetition of key rhymes. These correspondences and those of two other journeys interwoven into…
Joyner, William.
English Review of Salem State College 1.2 (1973): 28-41.
Examines ways in which the dreamer's journey in HF parallels his summary of the "Aeneid," identifying verbal echoes as well as similarities in plot and detail. Emends traditional punctuation of lines 109-13 to reinforce the parallel.
Juby, W. H.
ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes, and Reviews 1 (1988): 123-25.
A proverb in LGW (LGWPF 464-65) may in fact be a (translated) borrowing from a line in Gower's "Vox clamantis." If so, this is clear evidence of the argument raised by John Fisher that Chaucer was "substantially influenced by the older poet."
