Koppy, Kate.
Karen Pratt, Bart Besamusca, Matthias Meyer, and Ad Putter, eds. The Dynamics of the Medieval Manuscript (Göttingen: V&R Academic, 2017), pp. 147-64.
Examines the arrangement and composition of two of the booklets of the Findern manuscript (Cambridge University Library, MS Ff.1.6) for the ways they may be seen as "the record of interactions within the community of readers and scribes who had…
Pérez-Fernández, Tamara.
Karen Pratt, Bart Besamusca, Matthias Meyer, and Ad Putter, eds. The Dynamics of the Medieval Manuscript (Göttingen: V&R Academic, 2017), pp. 242-56.
Summarizes and extends recent scholarship on Guildhall scribe Richard Osbarn, and assesses his work, focusing on two TC manuscripts to which he contributed: San Marino, Huntington Library, MS HM 114, and London, British Library, MS Harley 3943.…
Pratt, Karen.
Karen Pratt, Bart Besamusca, Matthias Meyer, and Ad Putter, eds. The Dynamics of the Medieval Manuscript (Göttingen: V&R Academic, 2017), pp. 257-85.
Traces the emphases and manuscript contexts of Latin and vernacular versions of the Pyramus and Thisbe story from Ovidian origins to Chaucer's narrative in LGW, with emphasis on the comic or bathetic elements of Chaucer's account and on its place in…
Connolly, Margaret.
Karen Pratt, Bart Besamusca, Matthias Meyer, and Ad Putter, eds. The Dynamics of the Medieval Manuscript (Göttingen: V&R Academic, 2017), pp. 81-100.
Assesses the value of John Shirley's attribution of Adam Scriveyn to Chaucer in the only manuscript where it appears, arguing on the grounds of Shirley's "other statements about Chaucer" that the attribution is reliable and, on more general external…
Watson, Nicholas.
Karen Pratt, ed. Shifts and Transpositions in Medieval Narrative: A Festschrift for Elspeth Kennedy (Woodbridge, Suffolk; and Rochester, N.Y.: D. S. Brewer, 1994), pp. 89-108.
The relation of Lydgate and Henryson to Chaucer is anxious and competitive; their retellings of TC help canonize Chaucer but also subvert "his authority by criticizing or outdoing him." Lydgate associates Chaucer with Criseyde's falsity and "stands…
Pugh, Tison.
Karina F. Attar and Lynn Shutters, eds. Teaching Medieval and Early Modern Cross-Cultural Encounters (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), pp. 215-28.
Comments on the advantages of using new media to help students gain appreciation and expertise in studying Chaucer; includes descriptions of undergraduate classroom activities that use cinema, Chaucer blogs, YouTube videos of rap versions of…
Pakkala-Weckstrom, Mari.
Karind Aijmer and Britta Olinder, eds. Proceedings from the 8th Nordic Conference on English Studies (Goteborg: Goteborg University Department of English, 2003), pp. 121-36.
Pakkala-Weckstrom applies linguistic "politeness theory" to the use of pronouns as "forms of address in male/female dialogue" in MilT, MerT, ShT, ClT, Mel, WBT, and FranT. Usage is similar in the romances and religious tales but differs in the…
Blandeau, Agnès.
Karine Martin-Cardini and Jocelyne Aubé-Bourligueux, eds. Le Néo: sources, héritages et réécritures dans les cultures européennes (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2016), pp. 169-80.
Examines echoes, resemblances, and differences between the evocations of Lucretia in LGW, BD, and CT, and German painter Lucas Cranach's portrait (1513) of the Roman paragon of wifely virtue. References to Chaucer's poems, its ancient sources, and…
Blamires, Alcuin.
Karl Josef Holtgen, Peter M. Daly, and Wolfgang Lottes, eds. Words and Visual Imagination: Studies in Interaction of English Literature and the Visual Arts. (Erlangen: Universitatsbibliothek Erlangen-Nurnberg, 1988), pp. 11-31.
Medieval concepts of love and sex were derived from the worship of Venus, the goddess of love. Art of the period shows men worshipping Venus, as well as men and women trying to win each other's love.
Treacy, Anne-Marie.
Karl Kügle and Lorenz Welker, eds. Borderline Areas in Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-Century Music (Middleton, Wis.: American Institute of Musicology), 2009, pp. 221-29.
Comments on the influence of "Roman de la Rose" and Machaut's "Remede de Fortune" and "Jugement du Roy de Behaigne" on BD, suggesting that Chaucer reinvents the "French fashion for lyric interpolation" to "suit the needs of the grieving Black…
Hanning, Robert W.
Karl-Ludwig Selig and Robert Somerville, eds. Florilegium Columbianum: Essays in Honor of Paul Oskar Kristeller (New York: Italica Press, 1987), pp. 113-23.
Examines little-noticed instances "where allusions to classical texts, or to medieval recreations of pagan life and times," form part of Chaucer's narrative strategy in TC,MerT, and MilT.
Kiser, Lisa J.
Karla Armbruster and Kathleen R. Wallace, eds. Beyond Nature Writing: Expanding the Boundaries of Ecocriticism (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2001), pp. 41-56.
Through the tree catalog and the "unassimilated voices of the lower birds" in PF, Chaucer records his awareness that distinctions between nature and culture and between human and nonhuman are "species-ist"--an awareness similar to modern…
Elmes, Melissa Ridley.
Karma Lochrie and Usha Vishnuvajjala, eds. Women's Friendship in Medieval Literature (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2022), pp. 135-54.
Describes depictions of affective female friendship in works by Chaucer (TC and FranT), John Gower (Albinus and Rosamund in the "Confessio Amantis"), and Thomas Malory (portions of "Le Morte Darthur"), contrasting them with source materials and…
Lochrie, Karma.
Karma Lochrie and Usha Vishnuvajjala, eds. Women's Friendship in Medieval Literature (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2022), pp. 177-96.
Identifies three ways to illuminate female friendship in CT, disclosing "identity of feeling" among women (Custance, the Sultaness, and Hermengild in MLT), "enclaves . . . afforded by misogynistic discourses" (the Wife, her gossip, and female…
Fradenburg, Louise O.
Karma Lochrie, Peggy McCracken, and James A. Schultz, eds. Constructing Medieval Sexuality. Medieval Cultures, no. 11 (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesote Press, 1997), pp. 135-57.
Lacanian analysis of LGW that considers the hope of redemption as a function of charity in Aquinas and in Freud's commentary on Daniel Paul Schreber. Though beautiful and concerned with love, LGWP promises but does not fulfill the desire it creates,…
Nolcken, Christina von.
Katherine E. Ellison, and Susan M. Kim, eds. Collaborative Humanities Research and Pedagogy: The Networks of John Matthews Manly and Edith Rickert (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), pp. 303-42.
Examines archival records that pertain to the Chaucer Project (which produced "The Text of the Canterbury Tales" [1940]) to explore the history of the project, focusing on the work, working conditions, and attitudes of several scholars who assisted…
Mast, Isabelle.
Katherine J. Lewis, Noël James Menuge, and Kim M. Phillips, eds. Young Medieval Women (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999), pp. 103-32.
In Confessio amantis and his other works, Gower avoids the word "rape," perhaps because of its ambiguity, and he presents forced coitus in ways sympathetic to the victim and cognizant of female repression. Mast includes recurrent comparisons with…
Hadbawnik, David.
Katherine W. Jager, ed. Vernacular Aesthetics in the Later Middle Ages: Politics, Performativity, and Reception from Literature to Music (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), pp. 201-31.
Focuses on Norton and Gower, but closes with a comparison of Gower's "linking of alchemy and language" with Chaucer's in CYT and suggests that Gower combines Latin and English to "produce poetic truths" while Chaucer emphasizes "combinations of…
Reale, Nancy M.
Kathleen A. Bishop, ed. "The Canterbury Tales" Revisited--21st Century Interpretations (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2008), pp. 256-80.
Chaucer's CT, particularly GP, offers "as its 'utilitarian' value or 'worth' exemplary lessons on constructing social identity in the context of an emergent market system." This "bold step paved the way for modern ways of understanding the self,"…
Casey, Jim.
Kathleen A. Bishop, ed. "The Canterbury Tales" Revisited--21st Century Interpretations (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2008), pp. 209-27.
The price of love for Palamon and Arcite in KnT is violence and death, a feature of the "gender/violence/courtship paradigm" of medieval courtly literature that continues into the present, as evident in Brian Helgeland's "A Knight's Tale."
Fisher, Leona.
Kathleen A. Bishop, ed. "The Canterbury Tales" Revisited--21st Century Interpretations (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2008), pp. 151-65.
Affiliations between women and Fortune recur throughout MkT, a facile parallel rendered ridiculous by Chaucer's depiction of the Monk and the Monk's tale-telling style.
Spencer, Alice.
Kathleen A. Bishop, ed. "The Canterbury Tales" Revisited--21st Century Interpretations (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2008), pp. 228-55.
Explores tensions among the Boethian, Platonic form of Mel as a didactic dialogue, the Tale's practical Aristotelian subject matter, and its status as a compilation of composite proverbs. Reflecting a literate author, Mel modifies its sources and…
Jensen, Charity.
Kathleen A. Bishop, ed. "The Canterbury Tales" Revisited--21st Century Interpretations (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2008), pp. 281-99.
Although hedged in by bookish tradition, Chaucer "continually stretches the boundaries as he sets himself up as a legitimate auctor." Jensen assesses several of Chaucer's "self-authorising" interventions in the proems of TC, in WBP, and in Ret,…
Walzem, Al.
Kathleen A. Bishop, ed. "The Canterbury Tales" Revisited--21st Century Interpretations (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2008), pp. 44-59.
Reads the Wife of Bath as ur-feminist and traces parallels between WBP and WBT. These parallels indicate the Wife's efforts to teach feminist principles.
