An undergraduate Chaucer course exploring the late fourteenth century as a time of political, economic, religious, technological, and epistemological change can both enrich students' experiences of the texts and help them realize that…
Hass, Robin Ranea.
Dissertation Abstracts International 56 (1996): 3949A-50A
In the light of medieval "artes poetriae," rhetoric is perceived as feminine. Chaucer's hagiography, courtly romance, and fabliaux demonstrate rhetoric in various modes: as chaste, "pedestal," and wanton, especially as voiced by the Clerk and the…
Ferster, Judith.
Judith Ferster. Fictions of Advice: The Literature and Politics of Counsel in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), pp. 89-107.
Blends a "historicist" approach that sees Mel as topical to the later 1380s with "formalist" emphasis on its discontinuities and contradictions. Concludes that "in the context of the Appellants' struggles with Richard II,...the deconstruction of the…
Jost, Jean E.
Steven H. Gale, ed. Encyclopedia of British Humorists: Geoffrey Chaucer to John Cleese (New York and London: Garland, 1996): vol. 1, pp. 228-43.
Surveys the humor and structural comedy of Chaucer's works, especially CT, examining individual tales and commenting on BD, HF, and PF. Chaucer achieves comic effects through narrative resolution and by manipulating time, place, and circumstances. …
Explores the emergence of the modern, first-person persona as manifested in autocitation. Assessing the influence of Augustine, Anselm, Ockham, and others, Kimmelman traces the development of autocitation in the works of Guillem IX, Marcabru, and…
Koff, Leonard Michael.
Roger Ellis and Rene Tixier, eds. The Medieval Translator/Traduire au Moyen Age, 5. ([Turnhout, Belgium]: Brepols, 1996), pp. 390-418.
Briefly sketches a medieval philosophy of animal language in relation to medieval notions of translation as a communal ideal. In ClT, Chaucer presents translation as a form of revelation; in SumT, it is transgressive; in KnT, a kind of disguise. In…
Recent critical theory emphasizes reading from the margins to interrogate problematic "master narratives." When one teaches Chaucer to undergraduates, however, such interrogation may become "naturalized" as a new master narrative for…
Illustrates a variety of ways astrology has been used in literature, drawing examples from Chaucer, Shakespeare, John Webster, and Samuel Beckett. Cites examples from Mars, MilT, and FranT, as well as Hypermnestra in LGW.
Landman, James Henry.
Dissertation Abstracts International 57 (1996): 2492A.
The complicated matrix of late-medieval law, with its efforts to seek truth (even by torture), sheds light on the historical dynamics of various works.
Machan, Tim William.
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 18 (1996): 143-66.
Contrasts the printing history of Gower's "Confessio Amantis" with that of CT, describing how Berthelette's 1532 printing the "Confessio"--the only edition between Caxton and the nineteenth century--contributed to the critical privileging of Chaucer…
Nichols, Stephen G., and Siegfried Wenzel, eds.
Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996.
Nine essays by various authors and a closing commentary address organization, inclusion, and definition of medieval miscellanies--Latin, French, and English. The essays were first presented at a colloquium at the University of Pennsylvania in 1993.…
Max Weber's distinction between an "ethics of commitment" and an "ethics of responsibility" can help make the connection between theoretical assumptions and pedagogical practices explicit. An "ethics of commitment" leads to the idea of the teacher…
Perez Lorido, Rodrigo.
Luis A. Lazaro Lafuente, Jose Simon, and Ricardo J. Sola Buil,eds. Medieval Studies: Proceedings of the IIIrd International Conference of the Spanish Society for Medieval English Language and Literature (Madrid: Universidad de Alcala de Henares, 1996), pp. 247-59.
Though not a practicing musician, Chaucer had a better-than-average knowledge of late-fourteenth-century French monodic and English polyphonic music. This knowledge is evident in his specific and accurate use of musical terminology.
Theoretical studies of Chaucer often discourage student interest because of their difficulty and narrow focus. Teaching Chaucer to a diverse population in a small liberal arts college requires materials and activities such as videos, slides,…
Despite the increasing difficulty of retaining the Chaucer "canon" in university curricula of the 1990s, Chaucer-teaching is alive and flourishing, as evidenced in the colloquium on teaching at the 1994 New Chaucer Society meeting and the papers…
The electronic "preprints" of "Teaching Chaucer in the Nineties" revealed both the extent to which professors and students have become electronically literate and large disparities in the availability of electronic resources. Ironically, no papers…
Ross, Valerie Ann.
Dissertation Abstracts International 56 (1996): 3950A.
Chaucer and Marie de France simultaneously contribute to the development of vernacular literature and subvert its conventions through parody, pastiche, and resistance to existing gender models.
Summit, Jennifer.
Dissertation Abstracts International 56 (1996): 240A.
After the anonymity of earlier times, fourteenth-century writing reveals increasing individuation and attention to the gender of an author. Chaucer's fictional women writers indicate an anxious sense on his part of declining "auctoritas, whereas…
Taylor, Mark Norman.
Dissertation Abstracts International 56 (1996): 207A.
The outworn paradigm of courtly love has been discarded but not superseded by a model flexible enough to contain the many variations developed by "moralists and gameplayers." Treats troubadour verse, French and English romances and lyrics, and…
Tinkle, Theresa.
Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996.
Mythographic tradition provided Chaucer and his contemporaries a wide variety of significations for the figures of Cupid and Venus. Tinkle surveys this variety from antiquity forward, showing that vernacular representations of Cupid and Venus…
In the Ellesmere arrangement, CT forms a unified whole, modeled on the seven planets and on the traditional divisions of philosophy, offering a "planetary pilgrimage" and a philosophical "journey of the soul." Like Gower's "Confessio Amantis," CT is…
The selectivity of oral performance and scribal practice parallels the selectivity of hypertext presentation, raising questions about the order of the tales in CT. In MilP, the narrator enjoins readers to arrange the tales as they wish, adumbrating…
