Browse Items (16456 total)

Petrarch's "Letter to Colonna," twelfth-century handbooks for travelers and pilgrims, and SNT exhibit a characteristically medieval historiography that displaces a model of loss and recovery with one representing historical difference through spatial…

Reading the loathly lady's discourse on gentilesse (WBT) against the Statutes of Kilkenny (imposed by the English crown on the Anglo-Irish in 1366) highlights the conflict of nobility as defined either by blood line or by behavior (sanguinity or…

In presenting "werk," "multiplie," and "privitee" as pivotal words and concepts, CYT differs from Jonson's "The Alchemist." Yet both works demonstrate links between material transformation and the early history of capitalism.

Echoing Chaucer's poetry while portraying non-Christian, racialized others, the Middle English romance "The Sultan of Babylon" invokes a "Saracen Chaucer" whose status as national poet depends on such markers of difference.

The narrator of PrT desires to transcend the particularities of language and history, echoing patterns of medieval Jewish martyrdom connected to the "kiddush ha-Shem," which may have been known in Chaucer's England. Complex textual and historical…

Three variants of KnT--Sir John Clanvowe's reading of the story of Palamon and Arcite, Chaucer's KnT, and "The Kingis Quair" of James I--provide insight into the shifting ideologies of chivalric performance and the establishment of Chaucer as a…

Little reevaluates the Christian iconography in SNT in light of the Wycliffite debate over the use of images and their potential to become idolatry. Despite the importance of visual images, SNT shows a shift toward words and texts.

Contrasts PrT with Damián de Vegas's "Memoria del Santo Niño de La Guardia" (1544), exploring mother figures in the works and arguing that the latter work (like Spanish tradition more generally) reflects the influence of the "converso," a hybrid…

Looks at Shakespeare's "Troilus and Cressida" in the context of its medieval legacy, including works by Chaucer, Lydgate, and Henryson, to argue that Shakespeare "continues an important late medieval poetic tradition, which highlights the problematic…

Explores how John Arderne, Chaucer, and Thomas Hoccleve use the language of illness and healing in a wide range of texts, noting that the narrators present themselves as "flawed and sick" and that their narratives, like their bodies, are "not wholly…

Focuses on how manuscript compilations, especially biblical materials, are evoked in CT. Argues that a strictly historical arpproach to this material is inadequate and examines how an author can use the material form of books for specific literary…

Argues that in MkT, the Monk proves himself to be not only a reader and interpreter of tragedy, but also a critic of the concept itself.

Uses trauma theory to read KnT as a "meditation on catastrophe and survival."

Focuses on three different approaches to CT, examines the ways that scholars have attempted to avoid ascribing intention to Chaucer, and concludes that "when engaging with Chaucer, critics need to embrace intention as a key generator in the…

Offers precedents from medieval texts to show that to learn from a text, readers "have reason to consider what its author means"; that, when readers are "morally engaged with a text," they have reason to engage with the author's intentions"; and…

Gauges the influence of NPT on Edmund Spenser's "Muiopotmos," considering details of plot, tone, and the relative freedom of the protagonists of the two poems. Spenser emphasizes Clarion's freedom more than Chaucer does Chauntecleer's, but the…

Problems of tone--comic versus tragic--make the reader of MLT uneasy. There is also the problem of the weakness of the "literal narrative and the heavy-handed intrusions of the author." One can discern meaningful form, however, if one observes that…

Far from being "entirely tropological" or imaginative, the descriptions of the Temple of Venus and the House of Fame and Rumor accurately reflect the forms and details of contemporary structures. As Clerk of the Works and perhaps an acquaintance of…

In having the Eagle retell the story of Phaethon from Ovid and from medieval interpretations of Ovid, Chaucer oversimplifies and creates conflicts or deficiencies of meaning; this allusive and contradictory treatment of literary tradition in HF…

Allegorical traditions of the Mars and Venus myth were adopted and elaborated upon in the Middle Ages to demonstrate that "passion for woman encroaches upon the masculine cares of war," as in Troilus's shifts from warrior to lover. In the Epilogue…

A late-sixteenth-century account of Chaucer's life and works, never before published, "gives fresh insight into the nature and transmission of the poet's reputation in England during the Renaissance."

Analyzes Chaucer's use of the science of optics in RvT.

With comic irony Chaucer contrasts Harry Bailly with the Monk and with Dante's Virgil. The Host is a failed spiritual guide and a burlesque Christ-mass priest.

Not mere humorous touches, Chaucer's complex parodies of the mystery plays of Noah and Herod cover "biblical figures and events, the contemporary religious drama,...and exegesis, which lay behind the widespread use of typology." MilT explodes in…

BD is an "open-ended legend of imagination in which grief is accepted rather than eradicated...(Its) main theme is the reanimation of imagination." It proceeds by "structures of inconsequence that draw attention away from theme to poetic method." …