Browse Items (16456 total)

Transcribes a version of Lydgate's "Thoroughfare of Woe" from London, British Library, Additional MS 60577 (the "Winchester anthology") and discusses it in light of other versions, commenting on it as "an extended meditation on a proverbial saying""…

Surveys the metafictional aspects of TC, HF, and NPT, defining narrative and stylistic self-consciousness as recurrent themes. Henryson, Dunbar, Skelton, and James I of Scotland accomplish similar ends through self-reflexive and intertextual…

Explores the "moralitas" of Henryson's poem and conjectures that KnT was a "major shaping force" in it.

Reads Seige as an attempt to provide CT with "a sense of closure and completeness" by supplying the tale of Thebes to balance the plot, style, and themes of KnT. The poem capitalizes on the popularity of CT and acknowledges Chaucer's greatness.

Examines the details and style of Beryn, arguing that it was written to complete CT and that it capitalizes on several of its narrative and stylistic features. Suggests that Beryn was composed by a monk of Christ Church, Canterbury, perhaps in…

Considers The Testament of Cresseid as a "parallel text" to TC 5, arguing that although Henryson echoes various Chaucerian collocations, techniques, and structures, his counterpointing of fickle and stable earthly love is unlike Chaucer's opposition…

Discusses exemplary use of Medea in classical and medieval traditions, suggesting connections with Boccaccio's De claris mulieribus and Christine de Pisan's Book of the City of Ladies. Also notes comparisons among LGW, Lydgate's versions of the…

Davenport's survey articulates formal, thematic, and verbal influences of PF and HF on a wide variety of late-medieval English bird poems, also mentioning those in which Chaucer's influence is not apparent.

Chaucer's various uses of the "structural, rhetorical, and metaphorical possibilities" of prison imagery reflect Boethian thought and influence later medieval English tradition, in particular The King's Quair of James I of Scotland.

Reconstructs from documentary evidence aspects of Elizabeth de Burgh's holiday entertainment at Hatfield House in 1357-58, when Chaucer was her page, positing that Chaucer's mature recollections of performative readings can be found in BD, 349-61,…

The Wife of Bath tells us that she acquired forbidden learning through forbidden sex with university students, breaking the barriers of both literacy and celibacy, as reflected in her challenge to Pauline epistles and Jerome's Vulgate.

Discusses canonical doctrine about sexual relations in marriage as it was understood between the twelfth and mid-fourteenth centuries--an era in which scientific jurisprudence came of age. Makowski focuses on the concept of conjugal debt, referring…

Refers briefly to the Wife of Bath while discussing a document about a female English pilgrim, Isolde Parewastell, who journeyed to Jerusalem from England and who requested that the pope grant her the right to a chantry in England because of her…

Discusses Chaucer's women and their relations with pilgrimage and learning. The Wife of Bath rebels against her husband's book of wicked wives. The Prioress tells of a boy's eschewing his primer in order to sing a hymn he does not understand from…

Assesses the Wife of Bath (in contrast to the Clerk) and the Pardoner (in contrast to the Parson) as "Chaucer's Diptych of Eve and Adam," commenting on their depictions in the Ellesmere manuscript and reading them as inversions of the ideals of…

Analyzes Chaucer's uses in LGWP of the term "legend" and the image of "gleaning" for literary leftovers, the latter derived from Leviticus and here linked to the Book of Ruth. Reads these devices for their implications in the development of…

Also published in Sheila Delany, Medieval Literary Politics: Shapes of Ideology (Manchester University Press, 1990), pp. 74-87.

Four dreams help structure TC: Criseyde's about Pandarus and about the eagle; Troilus's about his fall and about the boar. The dreams reveal character: Criseyde's dreams cause no narrative conflict; Troilus's become an essential part of his story.

Interpretations of the Wife of Bath through socioeconomic readings work less well than symbolic-aesthetic readings. The Wife's weaving reveals her less a businesswoman than an archetypal woman such as Eve or Mary, both portrayed as weavers of life.

Prologues are simply framing devices. WBT is not a device to explicate the Wife's character; it amplifies and creates variations on a theme in KnT.

The iconographic meaning of the colors red and white had been lost in folk traditions by the time Chaucer wrote KnT. Meaning comes from the joining of the two colors--a symbol of unity. Palamon's and Arcite's choices of colors for their banners…

The variations in scribal changes to Chaucer's text portray the various scribes' attitudes not only toward the subject matter of TC but toward the tale's central characters as well.

In SNT and PrT, hagiography is used in an orthodox form, while in MLT and ClT, the devices of hagiography are used to amplify the moral character of secular tales. Hagiographic devices indicate that these tales are serious, not satire.

MilT and KnT use parallel portrayals of two young men, Absolon and Arcite, who suffer from the malady of false love. Although Arcite is not cured of his illness, Absolon is, through a traditional cure recorded by several medieval physicians.

Textual evidence and historical information suggest that the Merchant of ShT is a money changer involved in usury. Usury was a sin equivalent to adultery. Love of money was more than simple "cupiditas"; because of his usury, the Merchant's wife…