Hieatt, A. Kent.
Theresa M. Krier, ed. Refiguring Chaucer in the Renaissance (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998), pp. 147-64.
Books 3-4 of "The Faerie Queene" are a meditation on the nature of sexual passion, deeply influenced by FranT (which Spenser paraphrases in part) and its emphasis on companionship as a brake on sexual passion. Spenser develops the meditation in his…
Johnston, Andrew James.
Walter Delabar and Jorg Doring, eds. Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) (Berlin: Weidler, 1998), pp. 239-64.
Assesses Brecht's portrayal of Galileo Galilei, comparing it with Chaucer's attitudes to scholastic science and scientific language in SqT and Astr, Lydgate's assessment of Chaucer's scientific writing, Petrarch's view of scholastic philosophy and…
Depictions of the seasons in late medieval literature are loci for considerations of good and evil, mutability and human responsibility. The conventional representation of the seasons are reversed in "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," The Townley…
Dietrich, Stephanie.
Peter G. Beidler, ed. Masculinities in Chaucer: Approaches to Maleness in the "Canterbury Tales" and "Troilus and Criseyde" (Toronto, Buffalo, and New York: University of Toronto Press, 1998), pp. 205-20.
The characterization of the male hero in the four portraits of Troilus exhibits "gender slippage" through "linguistic slippage." The second and third portraits show Chaucer subverting gender assumptions, while the other two are more "essentialized"…
Attempts to "rehabilitate the status and reputation of lines 1.890-96," which some authorities have viewed as an insertion that breaks the continuity of Pandarus's encomiums for Criseyde. Starting from the supposition that these lines were composed…
Dobbs, Elizabeth Ann
Chaucer Review 32 (1998): 400-22.
TC contains a series of images of windows both open and closed, which are added to (or changed from) Chaucer's sources and which provide a commentary on the relationships between the lovers. Views out of windows are limited views, or "fictions,"…
In TC, Deiphebus serves as an important foil to Troilus. He exposes Troilus not only as weak and inadequate but also as human, something Hector is not.
Hanning, Robert W.
James J. Paxson, Lawrence M. Clopper, and Sylvia Tomasch, eds. The Performance of Middle English Culture: Essays on Chaucer and the Drama in Honor of Martin Stevens (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1998), pp. 143-59.
In TC, the narrator and Pandarus are mediators--purveyors of desired commodities (women or love stories) to a designated recipient (Troilus; the audience assembled for the occasion). Hanning examines the "crisis of mediation" of late-medieval…
Kawasaki, Masatoshi.
Journal of British and American Literature (Komazawa University) 33 (1998): 1-11
Assesses the importance of Troilus's apotheosis, emphasizing Chaucer's debt to Boethius and considering the poet's uses of juxtaposition and his fusion of classical and medieval ideas.
PF offers an example of Chaucer's intertextuality. The two "olde bokys" mentioned--Macrobius's commentary on "Somnium Scipionis" and Alain de Lille's "De planctu naturae"--inform the themes of suffering in love and the limitations of natural law in…
Krier, Theresa M.
Theresa M. Krier, ed. Refiguring Chaucer in the Renaissance (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998), pp. 165-88.
PF and "Love's Labours Lost" develop similar relations between lyrics and poetic or dramatic narratives. Shakespeare emulated Chaucer's movement from narrative to song--a psychoanalytic release from courtly or social constraint into "cosmic,…
Like "Inferno" 5, PF contains references to Earthly Paradise and Hell, the dream, and the fate of those who attend to private lusts. Dante compares the plight of souls to that of several kinds of birds, including three of the four bird categories in…
Moore, Marilyn L. Reppa.
Chaucer Review 33 (1998): 43-59
Troilus's character should be viewed not in the light of medieval romance but within the context of medieval "devotion," such as that advocated in St. Anselm's "Proslogion." It is more important to realize that Troilus learned to love with constancy…
Simpson, James.
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 20 (1998): 73-100.
Reads LGW as a work about "voluntarist" hermeneutics, reflected in Cupid's "cupidinous," tyrannical understanding of TC and in the narrator's telling of the legends as a "testamentary document of a dying author."
Percival, Florence.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Chaucer's LGW testifies to the disparate views of women prevalent in the Middle Ages. A complex medieval notion of Woman informs the structure of the poem: in the prologue, Chaucer praises conventional ideas of female virtue, while in the legends…
Crane, Susan.
New Medieval Literatures 2 (1998): 159-79.
Suggests that "maying" shapes participants' sexuality, thereby furthering the "ritual's enactment of social status." Uses LGW as an example of the mirroring of human qualities in the natural world.
Boitani, Piero.
Rivista di Letterature Moderne e Comparate 51 (1998): 251-69.
Uses the "chunnel" as a metaphor of the literary and cultural interconnections between England and the European continent,assessing classical and medieval influence on HF: Virgil, Ovid, and Claudian, along with medieval writers of Italy, France, and…
Chaucer writes in a "highly literate cultural code of poetry," which reveals the evolving persona of the poet. It is possible that he read HF aloud in installments and that the original ending--reflecting, no doubt, some crisis at court--was…
Martin, Carol A. N.
Theresa M. Krier, ed. Refiguring Chaucer in the Renaissance (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998), pp. 40-65.
Assesses the presentation of HF in Speght's edition as an example of "Renaissance uneasiness" with the poem. Explains this uneasiness by contrasting HF with Sidney's "Apologie for Poetrie" (and Boccaccio's "Genealogie deorum gentilium libri"),…
McTurk, Rory.
Leeds Studies in English 29 (1998): 173-83.
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.
Meecham-Jones, Simon.
Neil Thomas and Francoise Le Saux, eds. Unity and Difference in European Cultures. Durham Modern Language Series (Durham: University of Durham, 1998), pp. 155-71.
HF is a response to the "creative anxiety inherent in seeking to continue a literary inheritance believed to have already reached its highest peaks of achievement." In his presentation of a desert landscape, Chaucer partially resists Continental…
