Browse Items (16459 total)

Reprints twelve essays on BD published between 1934 and 2007. The introduction by Ludwig (pp. 1-4) summarizes the plot and characters of BD, and comments on its plot and sources, major themes, and critical reception. Includes a selected bibliography…

Edits Caxton's earliest Chaucer publications, except for the first printing of CT, including PF (aka "The Temple of Brass"), Henry Scogan's "Treatise" that includes Chaucer's Gent, the lyric "Wyth empty honde" that Chaucer alludes to in WBP (3.415)…

Describes the life and professional career of George Lyman Kittredge, prominent critic of Chaucer, editor of Shakespeare's plays, and scholar of ballads, folklore, and more. Quotes from a number of personal and professional letters as well as…

Considers the relationships between moral virtue/vice and physical beauty/ugliness in PardPT, focusing on the Old Man and the Pardoner.

In English literary tradition before Chaucer the concept of the devil has great vitality. But in CT, only in SumT and ParsT does the term "devil" have its traditional force; for the most part, one finds a transition away from the medieval idea.

Describes the history, goals, and methods of The Canterbury Tales Project, explaining how the electronic data have been organized and how the data can be accessed. Focuses on WBP.

Argues against finding Boethian certainty in TC and reads Lenvoy de Chaucer at the end of ClT as a negative response to the realism of the Tale.

Although the terms in the title are not the most frequently used in Chaucer's vocabulary, their collocations enable us to explore associations and meanings of colors, the gushing of blood from wounds, the physiology of emotions, devotion to Christ's…

London politics in the 1380s were characterized by "shifting planes of alliance." Such shifting in the early years of the decade led to the eventual struggle of 1385-88 between Richard's court party and the duke of Gloucester's aristocratic…

Argues that "to achieve some sense of what Petrarch meant to Chaucer we must...recover the historical specificity both of the Petrarchan texts and of Chaucer's reading of them." Petrarch's concern for the preservation of his texts induced him to…

Considers Chaucer's understanding of "tragedy" in Bo, MkT, and TC, tracing this understanding to Dante's use of the term in his "Inferno," where it is affiliated with history. In TC, Chaucer chose to emulate Boccaccio's "Filostrato" because doing so…

Argues that "Malkyn" in MLP (2.30) refers not to a generic "lewd woman" as suggested by W. W. Skeat but to the character Malyne in RvT, Symkyn's daughter, hypothesizing that Chaucer intended to cancel CkPT and follow RvT with MLPT.

Gauges William Caxton's appreciation of Chaucer's literature by exploring why Caxton printed the works of Chaucer that he did, how he treated the texts, and to what extent his decisions reflect his own tastes or those of patrons, poets, and the likes…

Demonstrates the "conventional and unspontaneous elements in the language" of early English letter-writing, citing examples from the Paston letters, Cely letters, Stonor letters, etc., and discussing how phrasing reflects earlier literary usage,…

Chaucer obviosly expects his audience to be familiar with his person, his previous writings, and his reputation as an author. He also expects his audience to reflect about the moral function of poetry. He draws his audience into his poetry by using…

Wyatt's awareness of the power of direct language is Chaucerian, as is the flexibility of his use of rhyme royal. Unlike Chaucer, however, Wyatt is a poet of the contraries existing within the individual, and whereas Chaucer advocates a stable mind…

Manuscript evidence suggests Chaucer's developing conception of the Wife in her GP portrait, the shorter prologue found in some MSS, the tale, and references made in ClT, MerT, and Buk. Some passage were added to WBT at a later date.

In GP, Chaucer changed approaches, developed new techniques, and became increasingly critical of society. Increased use of similes suggests that the portraits of the Squire, Monk, Friar, Miller, Manciple, Reeve, Summoner, and Pardoner were added…

In PardT, Death is assimilated to man's moral being.

More than a mere unifying element, the pilgrimage frame of CT introduces tales, sets the tone of complexity, universalizes the stories, prepares us for morality and mirth, and satisfies the Gothic urge for wholes within wholes. The Host is both…

Shifts of tone and tension between ironies of fatal necessity and fateful will create balance between appreciation of the lovers' nobility and pessimism about their frailty. The oxymoron functions thematically and modally: religious passion…

For individual essays that pertain to Chaucer, title-search under Leeds Studies in English 14.

ParsT is not a moral touchstone for judging all the tales but merely another example of a character's way of ordering his experience of truth through language and deliberate rhetorical patterning. The plain prose style embraces only one side of the…

WBT, Gower's "Tale of Florent," the "Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnell," and "The Marriage of Gawain" (from the Percy Folio) are sufficiently different from the Irish tales of the transformed hag to raise doubts about the transmission of this…

Surveys the tradition of the "prayer of the greatest peril" from Old French "chansons de geste" to Middle English adaptations of "romans d'aventure," arguing that the tradition underlies one of the prayers of Custance in MLT and several of the…