Surveys 115 books threatened with censorship in the United States because of objections to their social (rather than political, religious, or sexual) depictions. Arranged alphabetically by title of the work, each entry includes a plot summary, a…
Boitani, Piero, and Anna Torti, eds.
Cambridge: D.S. Brewer; Tubingen: Gunter Narr, 1983
Essays by various hands on fourteenth-century poetry, secular drama, songs, and lyrics. For individual essays that pertain to Chaucer, search for Literature in Fourteenth-Century England under Alternative Title.
An, Sonjae (Brother Anthony).
Seoul: Sogang University Press, 1997.
A traditional literary history of Britain from the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons until 1500, introducing major writers (including Chaucer) and works, with summaries and brief quotations.
Olson, Glending.
Ithaca, N.Y., and London: Cornell University Press, 1982.
Later medieval medical theories and ethical commentaries recognized the benefits of literary pleasure. Olson's aim is "to redress an imbalance in modern scholarship that fosters, intentionally or not, the notion that medieval literary thought had…
Kern-Stähler, Annette, and Elizabeth Robertson, eds.
Contains twenty-six essays by various authors on topics relating to the "wonder and mystery" of the five senses (and "Multisensoriality") in English literature, medieval to the present. The introduction by the editors describe the field of study, the…
Coss, P. R.
T. H. Aston et al., eds. Social Relations and Ideas: Essays in Honour of R. H. Hilton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 109-50.
Coss surveys Continental and English historical and literary uses of the term "vavasour" to demonstrate its varying meanings. Applied to Chaucer's Franklin, the term might convey an "old-fashioned air," but such connotations must be drawn from…
Howard, Donald R.
Massachusetts Review 8 (1967): 442-56.
Contrasts the climactic love scenes in Boccaccio's "Il Filostrato" and in TC, considering details, omissions, emphases, and narrative perspectives to argue that Chaucer makes the scene "emotionally, and indeed sexually, more intense" without being…
Newhauser, Richard G.,and John A. Alford, eds.
Binghamton, N.Y.: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1995.
Includes seventeen essays on Chaucer, "Piers Plowman," pastoral literature, scripture and homilies, and lyric poetry; a dedicatory introduction; and a list of Wenzel's publications. For four essays that pertain to Chaucer, search for Literature and…
Cole, Andrew.
Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
Post-Wycliffite writing has a different character from that which preceded it. Writers of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, including Chaucer, produced works with this novel character, often defined as heretical. Cole connects…
Sarmiento Hinojosa, Bernardo D.
Ph.D. dissertation (University of California, Berkeley, 2022), Dissertation Abstracts International 86.03(E). Abstract available at https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8qk5p6x6 (accessed February 1, 2025).
Examines "experimentalist modes of inquiry in Middle English literature and natural philosophy," including discussions of HF, LGWP, and other texts for the ways they "stage mental experiments that show how the material world might be perceived and…
Scase, Wendy.
New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.
Studies the "impact of judicial complaint on the formation of literary practice" in late medieval England, describing the "emergence and development" of the "literature of clamour" and exploring the influence of this literature on the rise of English…
Hadfield, Andrew.
Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2021.
Analyzes the relationship between conceptions of social class and literary representations of them in Britain from the fourteenth to the nineteenth century. Chapter 2, "Perceptions of Class in the Late Middle Ages," addresses William Langland's…
Teskey, Gordon.
Brian Cummings and James Simpson, eds. Cultural Reformations: Medieval and Renaissance in Literary History (New York: Oxford University Press), pp. 379-95.
Teskey explores the development of "story-telling" into "literature" in English tradition, including comments on Chaucer's place in this development.
Dobbs, Elizabeth [Ann]
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 14 (1992): 31-52.
Analyzes the tale-telling contract in the context of late-medieval English legal terminology. Explores Chaucer's use of legal diction and situation to establish both the telling of the tales as a form of pleading and the Host's role as judge until…
Focuses on Chaucer's position as lay controller of customs and argues that HF constitutes an attempt to change the field of literature to benefit--in socioeconomic and aesthetic senses--someone in his "liminal" professional position.
Meyer-Lee, Robert.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019
Discusses literary value and the value of continued interest in Chaucer's CT, focusing on parts 4 and 5. Argues that these parts function as a unified group, a framing that offers a new way to read and discover the value of the other CT tales.
Shoaf, R[ichard] A[llen].
Bruce Henricksen and Thais E. Morgan, eds. Reorientations: Critical Theories and Pedagogies (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990) pp. 77-92.
In medieval studies, which are threatened by pluralism, medievalists can communicate the intent of the originals (now translated) by using literary theory to examine "punning, allusion, quotation, and voice." Examines puns, etc. in TC, Dante's…
Yeager, R. F.
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 6 (1984): 135-64.
Caxton's Chaucer is "moral," while Thynne's is "gentle." In their selection and rejection of texts both were guided by established critical principles.
Butterfield, Ardis, Ian Johnson, and Andrew Kraebel, eds.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023.
Comprises twelve essays by various authors on topics relating to medieval literary interpretation and theory, rhetoric, and manuscript study, with an introduction by Andrew Kraebel, an account of Minnis's "Career and Contributions" by Vincent…
Strouse, A. W.
Dissertation Abstracts International A78.09 (2017): n.p.
Uses WBT as a case study in the development of circumcision's use as a metaphor for situations ranging from shifting of intellectual ground to the process of reading itself.
Rubey, Daniel Robert.
Dissertation Abstracts International 42 (1982): 3154A.
Medieval romances reflect changing attitudes toward social conflicts with chronologically developing alterations in their audiences. Chaucer's romances are studied briefly.
Examines HF as a literary satire, a comic send-up of the love vision genre, evident in the naiveté of the narrator and his failure to attain love or information about it. The poem's "central structural idea" is "comic disillusionment," underscored…
Wright, Monica L.
Sarah-Grace Heller, ed. A Cultural History of Dress and Fashion in the Medieval Age (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), pp. 159-72.
Explores medieval literary representations of clothing, nudity, and fashion. Includes discussion (pp. 160-63) of how the Wife of Bath's clothing indicates her "personality" and "the crisis of legibility in the fashion system in England"; reproduces…
