Browse Items (16469 total)

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…

Chaucer discovered tragedy as a narrative genre not from Boccaccio but from Boethius and from the glossator of his own copy of "De consolatione," who may have been Ralph Strode. Chaucer's concept of tragedy included the fall of the innocent as well…

A "correlative study" of the near contemporaries, Chaucer and Dafydd ap Gwilym, comparing their formal and linguistic innovations, their respective social standings and concerns with mercantilism and politics, and their relative concern with nature…

Through a computer count of the syllabic length of 15,294 verses of CT, Barber challenges J. G. Southworth's hypothesis that unstresses final "-e" was not pronounced in Chaucer's verse. The results suggest that syllabic symmetry could have been…

Indicates the frequency and distribution of pronounced unelided final -e among the parts of speech.

While Chaucer undoubtedly mined John of Wales's Communiloquium for details in PardT, he also consulted Jerome's Letter 22, to Eustochium, for details not found in John's florilegium. Comparison of PardT with Jerome's letter elucidates Chaucer's…

Examining Chaucer's construction of gender roles and role reversals in light of contemporary medieval texts, Blamires argues that Chaucer manipulated gender stereotypes. The poet ingeniously contrived Troilus and Anelida to confound specific…

Several studies have suggested Chaucer's indebtedness to works by Giraldus Cambrensis. Comparison of passages from the "Topographia Hibernie" and HF support the claim that Chaucer used this particular Latin source.

Examines how rape narratives explore relationships between literary conventions and the erotic, especially female erotic masochism, homosocial attraction, and the nexus of desire and abject sexuality.

Both Donne ("The Sun Rising") and Chaucer (TC 3.1415-1527) were familiar with Ovid's Amores 1.13), but Chaucer may well have influenced the Renaissance poet directly. Such intertextual issues are complicated by the fact that Renaissance editors had…

Explores the possible "theatrical context" of MilT, clarifying the cultural value of Absolon's status as a parish clerk and arguing that Chaucer's plot and treatment of gender in his characterization of Absolon were inspired by "amateur theatricals…

Critics generally gloss "embosen" as either "concealed in the woods" or "exhausted from the hunt." Examination of the word determines its precise meaning as a hunting term and also sheds light on Octovyen's hunt.

Argues that the rational absurdity of the plot of NPT and the inapplicability of the various morals applied to the Tale expose the ridiculousness of the fable genre; the Tale is an "anti-fable," as Th is an "anti-romance."

Gauges the Pardoner's attitude toward his Canterbury audience, including the Host. In PardP, he reveals how he usually treats his audiences, then insults the pilgrims by leveling differences in PardT. Like Faus Semblant of the "Roman de la Rose," the…

Reconsiders questions of the number of Canterbury pilgrims, focusing on GP, 1.164 and the ecclesiastical pilgrims. Suggests that the Nun's Priest and the Clerk may be identical or, at least, kindred spirits, and considers what NPT and ClT may reveal…

Discusses the "framing elements" of Mel, its glosses in the Hengwrt and Ellesmere manuscripts (comparing them with those in ParsT), and the codicological contexts of the five fifteenth-century manuscripts of the Tale that exist "outside the story…

Contends that the beating in RvT alludes to an incident in the life of St. Oswald the Bishop, arguing that the allusion enhances the Reeve's attack on the Miller and creates a sense of irony, as the Reeve suffers in comparison with his priestly…

Claims that William Dunbar's debt to Chaucer (WBPT) in his "Tua Meriit Wemen and the Wedo, "although "important and considerable, is often exaggerated beyond helpfulness." The poem owes a great deal to earlier alliterative poetry, in particular…

Although it is uncertain whether Chaucer knew Plutarch's "Life" of Theseus, in KnT the character is a mixture of the two traditions of the interpretation of Theseus: an Apollonian rationalist in Statius (the source in Anel) and a fickle lover in…

Collects twenty essays about thematic terms and concepts in Chaucer's works, arranged in groups of four, each group including an additional response essay. Opens with a foreword by Christopher Cannon, followed by an explanatory introduction by the…

Opens with an account of teaching PrT in comparison with Patience Agbabi's adaptation of it in "Telling Tales" (2015), helping to introduce the goal of the entire volume: promoting resistance to racist, xenophobic, and homophobic distortions and…

Opens with commentary on oldness in KnT, MilT, and RvT, and proceeds to assess old age as a source "of debility and impairment as well as authority and veneration" in Scog, Adam, the Reeve's description in GP, RvPT, and WBT. Disability studies and…

Contrasts MLT with "The King of Tars," "Bevis of Hampton," and the Becket legend (where Thomas Becket's mother is a "heathen or Saracen"), arguing that, unlike the "contradictory approaches . . . to the conversion of the Muslim Other elsewhere, MLT…