Harris, Carissa M.
Essays in Medieval Studies 27 (2011): 45-60.
Examines fifteenth-century scribal responses to sexual language in the CT, noting that some manuscripts either replaced obscenities or added to sexual language. Observing that female narrators in the CT are restricted in their use of vernacular…
A topically arranged survey of female same-sex desire in Western literature, with a brief discussion (p. 6) of MLT as "perhaps the earliest example in English" where "mutual passion between two women . . . moves the story along."
Baker, Denise N., ed.
Albany : State University of New York Press, 2000.
Eleven essays examining the reciprocity between literature and history in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. For two essays that pertain to Chaucer, search for Inscribing the Hundred Years' War under Alternative Title.
Examines the vice of curiosity, arguing that Chaucer both expands its application from the realm of the intellectual to the realm of the physical, and suggests that poetry may be a cause and a remedy for the desire to inquire into private matters.…
Donner, Morton.
Mediaevalia 9 (1986, for 1983): 125-44.
Chaucer was not an inept translator in Bo, as some contend, but an innovator who expanded the vocabulary of English ideological writing by some 500 constructions, anglicizing new Latin and Romance terms and extending the meanings of existing English…
Caie, Graham D.
Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 100: 175-85, 1999.
The extensive and apparently authorial glosses that accompany MLT often underscore contradictions-spiritual against material, internal against external, ascetic against monetary-between Innocent's treatise and the narrator's perspective; these…
Wildermuth, M. Catherine Turman.
Dissertation Abstracts International 45 (1984): 1112A.
Medieval literature uses pathos of innocent suffering to relate physical to spiritual. The humanization of Griselda highlights her Christian virtues; the Prioress emphasizes the spiritual; the Physician stimulates audience self-awareness.
Knutson, Karla.
Dissertation Abstracts International A70.06 (2009): n.p.
Knutson examines medieval ideas of innocence associated with penitential forgiveness in CT, "Pearl," and medieval pageant plays, suggesting that a later concept of innocence--a lack of "knowledge or experience"--shaped William Godwin's and Mary Eliza…
Lemons, Andrew Miles.
Ph.D. Dissertation. Princeton University, 2014. Available at http://arks.princeton.edu/ark:/88435/dsp01h415p968p. Accessed November 28, 2021.
Dissertation Abstracts International 75.08 (2014): n.p.
Identifies the "sense of middleness" found in Middle English verse that rejects "received concepts of poetic form and offers alternatives." Includes a reading of HF "in which Chaucer presents a radically unconventional definition of 'poetic voice' in…
Chancery highlighted problems posed in the medieval common law courts by failures in jurisprudence. MLT raises questions about injustice that reflect critically on the Sergeant of Law. Though he is shown to be an expert in jurisprudence, he is…
Thaisen, Jacob.
English Studies 95 (2014): 500-513.
Establishes that scribes are less likely than otherwise to introduce their own spellings of words that occur in initial position in verse lines, exploring why in psycholinguistic terms, and suggesting several implications for manuscript study. The…
Anastasopoulos, Alexandra.
Meeting of Minds XVII 11 (2009): 199-203.
Anastasopoulos argues for mediated influence of Benoît's "Le Roman de Troie" on characterization, didactic message, and acknowledgement of sources in TC.
Yeager, R. F.
In Miren Lacassagne, ed. Le rayonnement de la cour des premiers Valois à l'époque d'Eustache Deschamps (Paris: Presses de l'Université Paris-Sorbonne, 2017), pp. 69-79, 183-91.
Explores the influence of Eustache Deschamps on the development of non-musical fixed forms in the English lyric tradition, commenting on poems from Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson D. 913; the poems of "Ch"; and works by Chaucer and John Gower,…
Sawada, Mayumi.
Osamu Imahayashi, Yoshiyuki Nakao, and Michiko Ogura, eds. Aspects of the History of the English Language and Literature: Selected Papers Read at SHELL 2009, Hiroshima (New York; Peter Lang, 2010), pp. 131-42.
Tallies uses of "that" clauses and "to" clauses after the verb "command" in Chaucer's works, documenting their frequencies in various syntactic contexts.
Examines the "rhetoric of pestilence" as a "powerful contemplative tool" that urges readers to "self-examination, penitence, and a more active, strategic approach to death" in five texts: PardT, John Lydgate's "Danse Macabre," "The Castle of…
Matthews, David.
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 22: 93-114, 2000.
Surveys translations and bowdlerizations of The Canterbury Tales from ca. 1870 to the present, identifying variations on the tendency to present the work as morally regulatory or innocent. Focuses on adaptations by Mary (Mrs. H. R.) Haweis, Charles…
Frank, Robert Worth,Jr.
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 11 (1989): 5-14.
Argues that Chaucerians should assess more explicitly the consequences of critical readings: for instance, interpreting Alison of Bath as a murderer or Criseyde as having an incestuous affair with Pandarus.
Aligns vernacularity with visual and verbal profanity, observing occurrences in MilPT in which Chaucer "indulges in vernacular eschatology" and "moves to suppress it." Heyworth reads the window scene of MilT in light of medieval guides to…
Lindley, Arthur.
Robert J. C. Young, Ban Kah Choon, and Robbie B. H. Goh, eds. The Silent Word: Textual Meaning and the Unwritten. (Singapore: University of Singapore and Word Scientific, 1998), pp. 103-18.
Argues that gaps and "narratorial subversions" make Chaucer's works (and much of medieval aesthetic theory) "postmodern," comparing them with the definition of postmodernism by Ihab Hassan.
Whitebook, Budd Bergovoy.
Ph.D. Dissertation. Yale University, 1971. Dissertation Abstracts International 32.06 (1971). Full-text available from ProQuest Dissertations and Theses Global; accessed September 14, 2023.
Distinguishes two kinds of medieval romance hero: those who "are defined by institutional virtues" and those defined by "personal attributes and experiences." Treats characters from various romances, examining Palamon, Arcite, and Theseus of KnT in…
Rogers, William Elford
Annuale Mediaevale 15 (1974): 74-108
Close reading of the speech patterns of the Canterbury pilgrims in the links between the tales, focusing on level of diction (Romance vocabulary), syntax, and figurative language, and relating these features to characterization. Comments at length on…
Pickering, O. S., ed.
Woodbridge, Suffolk; and Rochester, N.Y.: D. S. Brewer, 1997.
Twelve essays by different authors examine the achievements of frequently neglected works, exploring the quality of the poems, their relations to various traditions and genres, and their poetic methods. Brief references to ABC, BD, GP, MilT, and…
