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Chaucer's unifying theme in PF is political rather than otherworldly. It involves the contrast between an orderly world governed by natural law (the gate's first inscription and Scipio's "commune profit") and a chaotic world controlled by selfish…

The cushion Pandarus fetches Troilus in Book III of TC linked for Chaucer's audience "Luxuria" and "Fortuna." Juvenal, Boccaccio, and contemporary iconography associated cushions with Sardanapalus, and thence with beds and lust. The analogy of…

Criseyde's "aubes" of TC, III and IV, wherein she swears her constancy to Troilus, ironically recall the "impossibilia" of anti-feminist lying-songs, which warned men not to put trust in women.

The large amount of alliteration in narrative and lyric poetry of the courtly tradition, including Chaucer's poetry, is derived from certain veins of devotional prose of the thirteenth century.

The magic of the Orleans clerk is nothing but stage illusion achieved by natural means. The inability of the characters (and indeed of the narrator himself) to distinguish these harmless tricks from astrology and witchcraft reveal their cultural…

The poet in BD takes the role of confessor and "medicus animae" to the Black Knight, whose shrift and repentance return him to the duties of everyday living. The hunt, which sets the scene, is an allegorical image of the process of confession…

ManT--a warning to the Cook with whom the Manciple quarrels--supports three main themes: the insignificance of social rank (9.105-270), the danger inherent in anger (271-91), and the foolishness of a wanton tongue (292-362).

"Sely" (from OE "gesaelig") originally meant "happy, fortunate," and hence "blessed by God, pious, holy." Later,however, the word took on connotations of "pitiful" and "silly, rustic," while still retaining its earlier meaning in different contexts.…

LGW satirizes the narrator's perspective on women rather than examining feminine virtue. Obvious distortions of the legends reveal the deficiency of the narrator's attitude: he idealizes women in passivity, irrationality, and stupidity.

Chaucer's close attention to Griselda's and Walter's faces throughout ClT makes allegorical interpretation insufficient. Walter's false faces emphasize his duplicity and cruelty, contradicting his correspondence to a higher beneficent order;…

In TC, Chaucer used the tradition of Joseph of Exeter and Benoit (who had drawn on Dares) to emphasize Troilus's public career rather than his private affairs.

MLT reflects the occupation of its teller both in its concern for "legal particularities" and in its vision of the beauty and order of the law, in such terms as "prudence" and forms of "govern." Constance's own name suggests "justitia."

The hunt passages in BD involve technical terms that have not been fully understood, e.g., "embosed," "forloyn," and "strake." The literal hunt dissolves to a metaphorical one in which the dreamer seeks the hurt heart. In terms of the narrator's,…

Chaucer creates structural, linguistic, and thematic affinities between the Mayings of Emelye and Arcite. Emelye's Maying implicitly presents her as a flower; her wearing of green clothes suggests both carnal Flora and chaste Diana. Arcite's song…

Notes several oaths by saints' names in Chaucer.

Susan Schibanoff (JEGP, 1977) is in error when she argues that the "impossibilia" testifying to Criseyde's love (TC 3.1492-98) suggests the medieval genre of the antifeminist lying-song. Rather, such "impossibilia" belong in a courtly context, and…

Spenser's indebtedness to Chaucer is several times acknowledged in "The Faerie Queene," but only in a curious, ambiguous way, "reducing rather than elevating Chaucer's reputation." Chaucer, for example, was hardly the poet of "warlike numbers" that…

Walter and Griselda are an "Oedipal couple whose sadomasochistic rituals of dominance and submission enact gender roles prescribed by patriarchal social structures which Freud recognized and propogated through his Oedipal models for mental health."

Chaucer's four additions to the story of Virginia can be explained, and the whole poem understood, as clarifications of "her allegorical role as the human soul" in rejecting sin.

The Pardoner's pragmatic claims for salvation are part of a larger "question of Christian worldly prudence" in CT. His "response to his own tale . . . alerts us to the growth of a pragmatic attitude toward individual death and salvation."

The portrait of the Man in Black of BD reflects a traditional "imago pietatis," the Man of Sorrows. So, to a lesser degree, do the Falcon of SqT and Criseyde.

Medieval contraceptive information includes mention of pears in discussion of techniques for preventing conception, so May's desire for a pear in MerT may indicate that she wants to deny January's foolish desire for offspring.

Reads ManT as a "story both of a wife who cuckolds her jealous husband and of a sexually aware trickster [the crow] who uses his knowledge, voice, and wit to gain freedom from his gilded cage." Both the wife and the crow seek freedom, but unlike the…

Larry Benson's understanding of "queynte" as an adjective (SAC 9 [1987], no. 54) is untenable since it depends on a rhyme pattern inadmissible in Chaucer. The true meaning is the traditional one of "pudendum."

Assesses the latent anti-Semitism in Wordsworth's "Song for a Wandering Jew," his "A Jewish Family," and his translation of Chaucer's PrT. The translation and contemporary reviews of it reflect nineteenth-century understanding of Chaucer.