Browse Items (16456 total)

In its use of unarticulated sounds, nonce words, models of grammatical meaning, and logical propositions and contradictions, as well as its specific historical circumstances, NPT draws on the most familiar and elementary of cultural structures,…

Because Heloise is canonized in Jankyn's "Book of Wikked Wyves" between Jerome and Ovid, her authentic voice is overwhelmed by their reinforcing discourses; the Wife of Bath is similarly contained between Chaucer and Jankyn. Chaucer and Jean de Meun…

Like Chaucer, Margery Kempe constructs a narrative context for the self she creates. Kempe uses autobiographical details to shape "Margery" into a representative type and to analyze communal values and practices. Kempe employs Chaucer's strategy of…

The transmission and reception of the "Aeneid" determined the possible meanings and appropriations for medieval and Renaissance writers, as HF makes clear in its skepticism.

While the iconography of the spinning woman is generally considered to represent domestic virtue, it can also demonstrate either a model of misaligned femininity, as exemplified by Cenobia in MkT (7.2373-74), or an instance of role reversal--a mark…

Reads ParsT as "just another tale" (rather than the crescendo of CT), adducing Boethian aesthetic and moral attitudes, Aristotelian poetics, and the sequence of the last four tales as evidence that we should read the penitential message of ParsT…

Considers the ambivalent treatment of fame in HF: as a sinful desire, as a goal for poets, and as an "amoral record of the past." Argues that this ambivalence is rooted in Boethius's "Consolation of Philosophy" and that it reflects Chaucer's…

The poet juxtaposes the narrator's dream to a summary of the "Somnium Scipionis," reconciling Venus and Nature, and resolving the strain of living in a world of abstract thought and human experience.

LGW contains examples of "the destructive results of excessive passion." Classical, patristic, and medieval attitudes to Cleopatra are negative; Chaucer is thus ironic.

That "Daphnaida" is based on BD has long been recognized. But whereas Chaucer's poem works within the conventions to assuage grief, Spenser's anti-pastoral produces an uncomfortable tension between instruction and pity.

Past opinions are either that Chaucer was profoundly involved with the tale and reflected the period's emotionalism or that he was detached and disenchanted with the narrator. Actually the tale is an exposure of the "publicly sentimentalizing…

Structure and theme of the Vision are established not only by the "Roman de la Rose" but by Latin poems: (1) visionary setting and (2) questing love-debate for a solution to the turmoil resolved (or unresolved) at (3) a Court of Love. Chaucer's…

Richard II's devotion to chivalric ideals may be seen in his conferring of knighthood, especially membership in the Order of the Garter.

Outlines "the significance of blue in the medieval period," and "examines this connection between colour and virtue in literature, heraldic treatises and works of art," including brief comments on blue and female fidelity in SqT and Wom Unc.

The obscure circumstances surrounding the three marriages of Joan of Kent are clarified by reference to the original documents. In 1340, at age 12, she secretly married Sir Thomas Holland. In 1341, while Holland was crusading in Prussia, she was…

Archibald surveys accounts of Oedipus and of Semiramis in classical and medieval texts, focusing on their concern or lack of concern with incest. Recurrent mention of Dante, Boccaccio, Christine de Pizan, and Chaucer-in particular TC, MLT, PF, and…

Traces the tradition of characterizing stories as "old wives' tales" from Plato through Apuleius and Jerome to Chaucer's WBT, showing how the genre draws power from the paradox that "old women were the least powerful members of society and yet the…

Lee assesses FranT as a "sequel" to SqT that repudiates its magic, replaces its stasis with moral development in the idea of "gentilesse," and provides a missing Christian subtext--a "Christmas miniature" that precedes the apparent disappearance of…

Philip Larkin's undergraduate essays and notes, preserved among Bruce Montgomery's papers at the Bodleian Library, record his reactions to Chaucer (generally positive) and Langland (negative).

Assesses the social and economic dynamics of CkT and the GP descriptions of the Cook and the guildsmen, arguing that the tale "indicts both the laterally mobile prodigal apprentice and the decadent hypocrisy" of his master "through the linked…

Uses Homi Bhabha's concepts of borderline community and mimicry ("The Location of Culture" [1994]) to investigate the descriptions of the guildsmen in GP, 361-78, as they relate to shifts and tensions in Chaucer's contemporary society, focusing on…

Assumes that the loathly lady in WBT is a witch, and maintains that she is "stigmatised in the poem to enforce the medieval discourse that appreciates nurture against nature, obedience against revolt, and youth and beauty against old age and…

A psychoanalytic analysis suggesting parallels between the "scopophilic" instinct represented in TC and the "extreme intertextuality" of the poem. Both are forms of the Oedipal complex whereby Criseyde, although she is finally unknowable, is for…

The traditional paratactic style of folktales and a literary style emphasizing causation and motivation relate to allegorical themes: Walter's self-centeredness and Griselda's self-effacing love. A markedly different style in the Envoy relates to…

Having moved in his own life from warfare to pilgrimage, Chaucer's GP Knight depicts Theseus, a conqueror in war at the beginning of his tale, as effecting a solution at the end "by the arts of diplomacy and rhetoric in parliament." Theseus, with…