In the allusions to infernal sufferers in medieval poems, the lover and the miser are often linked: both have lost their rational capacity, and the sins of both proceed from cupidity. Hence, such reference in BD and TC show that the Black Knight…
Bryson, Michael, and Arpi Movsesian.
[Cambridge]: Open Books, 2017.
Surveys depictions of love, from the Bible to English Renaissance literature, exploring poetic representations of love and the effects of efforts to sublimate or suppress it. The section on Chaucer (pp. 280-94), labeled "Post-Fin'amor English…
Saunders, Corinne [J.]
Helen Cooney, ed. Writings on Love in the English Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), pp. 45-61.
Apart from Chaucer's works, most romances in Middle English "rewrite" their French and Latin analogues, representing the virtuous aspects of love rather than the conventions of the courtly game. Chaucer's writing exemplifies the "extremes of fin…
Brewer, D[erek], S.
Modern Language Review 49 (1954): 461-64.
Challenges the critical "platitude" that love and marriage are incompatible in Chaucer. Identifies a number of instances in Chaucer's works where love and marriage clearly coincide, and argues that TC is only an "apparent exception" in this regard.…
Lipton, Emma.
In The Open Access Companion to the Canterbury Tales. https://opencanterburytales.dsl.lsu.edu, 2017. Relocated 2025 at https://opencanterburytales.lsusites.org/
Explores how and to what extent the WBP "presents both the challenges to women's agency posed by medieval marriage and, conversely, the ways existing practices of medieval marriage could be manipulated to empower women." Designed for pedagogical use,…
Kelly, Henry Ansgar.
Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1975.
Assesses the meaning and status of "courtly" love and its relation to marriage in medieval traditions and critical commentary on these traditions. Considers a wide range of medieval Latin and vernacular representations of love and marriage, and…
Archibald, Elizabeth.
Claire Vial, ed. 'Gode is the lay, swete is the note': Résonances dans les lais bretons moyen-anglais / Echoes in the Middle English Breton Lays (Etudes Epistémè, no. 25, 2014): n.p. (web publication).
Despite the widely accepted claim that French and Middle English Breton lays are concerned primarily with love, argues that the English poems pay relatively little attention to romantic love, and are more concerned with identity, family separation…
Bayley, John.
John Bayley. The Characters of Love: A Study in the Literature of Personality (London: Constable, 1960), pp. 51-123.
Explores the characterizations in TC of Troilus, Pandarus, and, most extensively, Criseyde, explaining how Chaucer modifies their antecedents in Boccaccio's "Filostrato" by adapting the conventions and rhetoric of courtly love and creates rich…
Fyler, John M.
Mediaevalia 13 (1989, for 1987): 295-307.
Ovid's views on humanity's decline from the first age influence Chaucer's "Former Age": Chaucer's use of Lamech in WBT, SqT, and Anel; and his distrust of rhetorical ornament (as evidenced by the Franklin and BD, for example).
Saunders, Corinne [J.]
Corinne Saunders, ed. A Concise Companion to Chaucer (Malden, Mass.; Oxford; and Victoria: Blackwell, 2006), pp. 134-55.
Saunders traces elements of Chaucer's "rarefied treatment of love" to Marie de France, Chrétien de Troyes, troubadours, trouvères, and Ovid, arguing that Chaucer developed a notion of "fin' amors" to treat philosophical questions as well as the…
Ruszkiewicz, Dominika.
New York: Peter Lang, 2021.
Considers relations between moral virtue and courtly love in a variety of Chaucer's works and Scottish Chaucerian works, analyzing a series of pairings--Rom and William Dunbar's "Golden Targe," Chaucer's Boethian poems and "The Kingis Quair," HF and…
Cooper, Helen.
Helen Cooney, ed. Writings on Love in the English Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), pp. 25-43.
Before TC and KnT, most romances in England were Anglo-Norman and largely uninfluenced by the conventions of courtly love and the Petrarchan tradition. The reputation of Chaucer's works overshadows that of these other works and their more practical…
O'Callaghan, Tamara Faith.
Dissertation Abstracts International 59: 2014A, 1998.
These works use the language and motifs of love to distinguish gendered passion. In particular, the diction and imagery of love associated with Criseyde in TC show her, unlike the male characters, to be motivated more by fear and a sense of honor…
Sidhu, Nicole Nolan.
Literature Compass 6 (2009): 864-85.
Sidhu surveys recent attention to gender in medieval studies and assesses the "continuing marginalization" of gender studies. Recurrent references to Chaucer studies.
Discusses Chrétien's "Knight of the Cart," including several points of comparison with TC: the poems as command performances, their inclusion of songs of love, and the possibility that the heroes are presented as humorous.
Simmons-O'Neill, Elizabeth.
Modern Language Quarterly 51 (1990): 389-407
Unlike its analogues, MerT develops themes and images associated with the myth of Proserpine's rape and Ceres's search for her daughter. As a result, both May and January are presented as culpable and victimized.
apRoberts, Robert [P.]
Chaucer Review 7.1 (1972): 1-26.
Suggests that Chaucer purges "sensuality" from Boccaccio's "Filostrato" when he adapts it as TC, and demonstrates in detail where the quality is consistently present in the Boccaccio's poem.
Lynch, Andrew.
Corinne Saunders, ed. A Concise Companion to Chaucer (Malden, Mass.; Oxford; and Victoria: Blackwell, 2006), pp. 113-33.
Lynch explains the centrality of the legend of Troy to European narratives as a symbol of human instability and as a mirror of the present, especially in late medieval London. In comparison to its sources, TC keeps war on the periphery of the love…
Allen, Peter Lewis.
Dissertation Abstracts International 45 (1985): 2516-7A.
Although classical and medieval rhetorics stress conventional "topoi," love poetry also supposedly emphasizes originality and sincerity. Certain classical and medieval poets including Chaucer ironically play off convention against their own ideas.
Georgianna, Linda.
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 12 (1990): 85-116.
CT examines such religious practices as pilgrimage, pardon, and penance within medieval soteriological traditions, which often analyzed redemption in commercial language. Particularly in GP and PardT, "Chaucer's understanding of the terms of…
TC indicates that love letters were written on paper in England as early as the 1380s. Uses TC to frame connection of paper with verse love epistles and their fictions.
