Browse Items (16459 total)

Surveys Old English and Middle English works to determine interconnectedness of the language and texts. Brief discussion of Chaucer's GP. Includes glossary and bibliography.

Facing-page German prose translation of the Riverside text of CT. Original German apparatus includes notes, introductions to Chaucer's life and to the tales, a guide to pronunciation, a history of criticism, and a bibliography.

Item not seen.

Item not seen; cited in WorldCat, which indicates that this anthology includes material by Chaucer in German translation.

Examines questions of autobiography, authorship, legacy, and the "Fürstenspiegel" genre in Thomas Hoccleve's "Regiment of Princes," with attention to its manuscript presentations and to its images of Chaucer and of Hoccleve himself, discussing the…

The Manciple, Physician, and Clerk strain the notion of fictive propriety with their stories. They exploit the storytelling occasion by attempting to come to terms with their estates and the often oppressive audience through replicating conditions…

Unlike other recent critics, who have viewed Mel as a "treatise," Kempton sees it as a "tale" with dramatic personages. It is meant not to enforce one didactic point but to teach us to give up the search for authority and to enjoy the play of…

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…

The Host's aversion to this tale is a clue to its interpretations: the narrator, a typical medieval physician, reveals himself and his profession through his narration. The death of Virginia is emblematic of the Physician's lack of concern for his…

NPT is a "mock-summa" that skeptically examines how authority is conveyed and parodies "didactic mechanisms." Mocking various kinds of rhetoric and discourse, the Nun's Priest also evokes a laughter of merriment that "laughs without laughing at…

Challenges the use of a mid-line semicolon in FranT, 964, arguing that it and the virgule in the Ellesmere manuscript disambiguate the syntax of the description of the conversation between Dorigen and Aurelius, diminishing the characterization of…

As reflected in ShT, medieval urban space allows the powerful to exert political influence by converting capital into noncommercial culture.

Studies the "lordship economics" of late fourteenth-century England, especially as represented in the literature of John Gower, but providing historical and political backgrounds, and commenting on similar concerns in Chaucer and other writers.…

Item not seen. Kendall's abstract indicates that the "vision poetry" of both Chaucer and Sir John Clanvowe share "discursive territory" with Gower's "Confessio Amantis," particularly "concepts of the late fourteenth-century aristocratic household and…

Compares Chaucer's and Deschamps's poetic critiques of the "comedy of drunkenness," examining passages in GP, MLT, PardP, and ManP as well as Deschamps's chanson royale "Sur l'ordre de la Baboue" (included, with translation, in an appendix). Traces…

Writing fixes texts, inviting marginal explication and commentary. Dante, Boccaccio, Deschamps, Langland, Gower, and Chaucer annotate their own texts to "authorize" them, although modern scholarship has been reluctant to accept glosses as…

Using "paradigms" of human behavior drawn from psychology, psychoanalysis, and anthropology, Kendrick studies play in CT. Chaucer's tales involve either "pathetic fictions that foreground individual accommodation to exterior reality or public…

Lydgate's "Troy Book" describes the classical theater as a semicircle with a raised pulpit in the midst. This is what is portrayed in the Corpus Christi College (Cambridge) manuscript: finely dressed figures mime the roles of the principals while…

Examines Froissart's and Christine de Pisan's treatments of fame and the role of the poet in bestowing it. Questioning this tradition in HF, "Chaucer's art is to mask his own opinions and to reveal his readers' to themselves."

Architectural details, including rows of pillars and statues in Fame's hall, are probably exaggerations of the Palais de Justice, which Chaucer had seen in 1377.

Ballad 285, in praise of Chaucer, draws from Brunetto Latini's definition of philosophy in his "livres dou tresor."

Investigates the burlesque effects of the -"aille" rhymes in the envoy to ClT. Like Eustache Deschamps, Chaucer plays with the plaintive effect of the sound, but he inverts the tone through male exhortation of a feminist position and through the…

Explores wordplay involving French and Anglo-Norman "bords" that may have authorized the use of the borders of medieval illuminated manuscripts for visual jesting, contestation, and derision. Considers the verbal "borders" of CT in relation to this…

Surveys French compilations to argue that CT "appears to burlesque the uniformly high-minded French prose compilations ... actively encouraged by the Valois princes in the second half of the fourteenth century."

Challenges assumptions underlying traditional studies of sources and relative chronology, suggesting that similarities between Deschamps's work and Chaucer's are evidence of late-fourteenth-century literary style and common "mentalites". Compares…