Browse Items (16469 total)

The annotations from Virgil and Seneca in a copy (not previously discussed) of Stow's edition of TC act much like footnotes in modern editions to identify such things as analogues. They also demonstrate that classical tag-lines had become common by…

Olsan makes a brief reference to ParsT and "charms for wounds and sickness."

Considers marginal glossing in manuscripts of TC and CT as examples of actual reader experience of those texts, with an eye toward recognizing different interpretations and hermeneutic approaches from relatively contemporary readers.

There are significant differences between Chaucer's and Gower's appropriations of the Roman de la Rose and its Latin antecedents. Gower's priestly Genius is an authority figure in the tradition of Boethius's Consolation. Chaucer's rejection of…

According to Walker, the three males in MilT anticipate familiar types of masculine "fool" in English dramatic tradition: John as cuckolded senex amans, Nicholas as the punished "Priapic fool," and Absolon as the "squeamish, infantalised male."…

Although Old English poetry always depicts Satan as supernaturally powerful (while doctrinally powerless), late-Middle English works show him as comic, the boaster who must fail--as in the mystery cycles followed by the morality plays. In Chaucer's…

Argues that Holcot and Chaucer "depict a world in which farce and deception are possible." Discusses how Chaucer's ironic humor and "Chaucerian misdirection" fuel the ambiguity in ClT and NPT.

Comments on the legacy of Chaucer's humor in English literature, and includes a brief introduction to CT and selections from GP (descriptions of Wife Bath, Miller, Summoner, and Pardoner) in modern English translation (by Nevill Coghill), accompanied…

Suggests the "possible influence" of Horace's Ode 1.9 on Alisoun's laugh in the dark in MilT, observing similarities in erotic setting, imagery, and opposition between youth and age.

Response to saints' legends is normally sober, but "Legenda Aurea," Chaucer's source for SNT, exhibits flashes of humor. In a reading of SNT that accepts the natural response of laughter, Valerian, Tiburce, and Almachius are seen to play the fool,…

So rarely does medieval poetry combine comedy and allegory that superficially the two modes seem irreconcilable: for some, humor undermines allegory's decorum of high seriousness; for others, it provides (at best) only badly needed comic relief. …

Discusses Chaucer as the first English poet laureate in a larger argument for the political impetus behind the selection of Robert Southey, William Wordsworth, Samuel Rogers, and Alfred Tennyson as laureate poets of the Victorian period.

Compares the models of memory presented by the narrators of Chaucer's TC and Lavinia Greenlaw's "A Double Sorrow," her poetic adaptation of TC published in 2014. Argues that while Chaucer's narrator uses classical models of memory that involve the…

Reprints twelve of Kelly's studies that pertain to Chaucer and his historical contexts, with an introduction, some addenda and corrigenda, and a cumulative index. The essays are reproduced in their original typefaces and with their original…

Suggests that behind several legal maxims found in RvPT stands the broader principle of measuring one law by another: "the old by the new, the Continental by the English, the private by the public, the Mosaic by the Christian."

Demonstrates that in Lydgate's "Disguising" the wives' use of Chaucerian "performative and legalistic speech acts" is set in evocative conflict with the "theatricality of monarchical justice," arguing that Lydgate learned from Chaucer's WBPT how…

An exhaustive study of sexual practices and attitudes (both "official" and "popular") and the attempted regulation of sex and marriage under canon law. Chapter 10 deals with the period from 1348 to the Reformation.

Caie describes how lay people gained access to the Bible in the late Middle Ages through sermons, compendia, and florilegia. Explores how Chaucer characterizes speakers through their uses of the Bible in CT (e.g., quotation, misquotation, selection,…

Rice studies late fourteenth-century vernacular prose devotional guides, with attention to their relationship with works by Chaucer and Langland. Wycliffite writings and changes in religious discipline affected notions of how to live the "best life,"…

Constructs a model for the reception of Gower's "Confessio Amantis" that accommodates its combination of English, marginal Latin glosses, and very difficult Latin prefatory verses. Clerk-prelectors probably studied the work before performing…

Suggests that Chaucer's CT, the "Lais" of Marie de France, and the "Book of Margery Kempe" include "theopolitical" ideas and thus are informed by the Church's influence on these ideas and on the notion of identity.

The language used to describe Hippolyta in KnT undermines the praise of Theseus and exposes "the dramatic irony in the Knight's perception of Theseus's military exploits and subsequent exchange of ethnic women."

Considers the dates of BD and Jean Froissart's "Dit dou Bleu Chevalier" and explores their similarities, arguing that Froissart's poem inspired the central idea ("l'idée centrale") and many other features of Chaucer's poem--aspects of…

After a short survey of France's discovery of medieval English literature, especially Chaucer, in the nineteenth century, Dor describes the main features of Chatelain's first complete translation of CT into French, published in London from 1857 to…

Considers BD as a partition between the mythical and fictional worlds and reality, as a textual space of transition where poetic experience and real life are intertwined.