Item not seen. Publisher's information indicates that the volume includes discussions of two sections of HF, comparison of Chaucer's (LGW) and Shakespeare's accounts of the rape of Lucrece, and suggestions for university teaching of Chaucer and…
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. …
Leonard. Frances McNeely.
Ph. D. Dissertation. University of Kansas, 1972. DAI 33.11 (1973): 6316-17A. Fully accessible via https://kuscholarworks.ku.edu/entities/publication/0f8d3fe5-47a1-4a74-92f4-a04a137a986d (accessed April 12, 2026).
Despite the apparent clash between comedy and moral allegory, writers from Chaucer to Spenser combine the two, a fusion rooted in 'La Roman de la Rose.' Treats BD and HF as well as works by Gower, Dunbar, Skelton, and Spenser.
Lepine, David.
Stephen H. Rigby, ed., with the assistance of Alastair J. Minnis. Historians on Chaucer: The "General Prologue" to the "Canterbury Tales" (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 334-51.
Provides historical background about the English Church in the late fourteenth century, and on several religious controversies, including the "culture of anticlerical complaint and the challenge of Wyclif and the Lollards," that contributed to…
Lepley, Douglas L.
Chaucer Review 12 (1977): 162-70.
Despite recent arguments to the contrary, parallels (such as the depiction of Fortune) between MkT and Books II-IV of "The Consolation of Philosophy" show that the Monk's tragedies are philosophically sound in Boethian terms.
Lepley, Douglas Lee
Dissertation Abstracts International 38 (1978): 1539A.
Neither tedious nor ignorant, MkT teaches a "sound Boethian lesson" and can be seen as "artistically refined" in its evocation of tragic pathos. The Knight, the Host, and the critics err in castigating the Monk and his Tale.
Lerer, Seth, and Deanne Williams.
Shakespeare 08 (2012): 398-410.
Argues that Shakespeare's reading of Thomas Speght's edition of Chaucer's "Works" (1598) provoked his creative imagination as well as providing source material, looking closely at how Chaucer's depiction of Julius Caesar's death in MkT affected…
Lerer, Seth, ed.
New Haven, Conn., and London : Yale University Press, 2006.
An introduction and ten essays by various authors, with several appendices (chronology, a guide to textual studies, order and pattern within CT, and maps), plus a bibliography and an index. Aimed at an American audience, the volume seeks to "combine…
Fifteenth-century readers of Chaucer shaped the Chaucerian canon and cult of authorship by appropriating both the language and the rhetorical strategy of ClT, wherein the Clerk simultaneously recognizes the authority of Petrarch and appropriates to…
Two CT manuscripts reveal simplifications of Chaucerian narrative as part of the fifteenth-century reader response valuing sententiousness and formal coherence. Huntington Library MS 140 includes ClT without its framing references, followed…
Lerer, Seth.
Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993.
Examines Chaucer's reception in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries and its relation to the historical development of poetic identity. In their responses to and depictions of Chaucer, such writers as Lydgate, Clanvowe, James I, Hawes, and…
Lerer, Seth.
Mark C. Amodio, ed. Oral Poetics in Middle English Poetry (New York and London: Garland, 1994), pp. 181-205.
Th and Mel pose an oral-literate opposition. Th is a parody of rambling orality, more concerned with its narrator than with its protagonist; constant interruptions and stereotypical devices direct the audience's attention away from the story. In…
Lerer, Seth.
Dolores Warwick Frese and Katherine O'Brien O'Keefe, eds. The Book and the Body. University of Notre Dame Ward-Phillips Lectures in English Language and Literature, no. 14. (Notre Dame, Ind., and London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997), pp. 78-115.
Examines how Stephen Hawes's "Conforte de Louers" and "Pastime of Pleasure," in selected allusions and references to TC, conflate the poet's identity and the act of reading. Reactions to the Hawesean poems in Humphrey emanuscript collection suggest…
Lerer, Seth.
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. 59-76.
In the beginning of CT, Chaucer's references and allusions to late-fourteenth-century theater indicate the potentially disruptive nature of dramatic public expression. CT defines the cycle plays as radically other-provincial, civic, and communally…
Lerer, Seth.
Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Assesses various aspects of Tudor political and literary culture (e.g., privacy and voyeurism, theatricality, letter-writing and -reading), discussing Pandarus and the Renaissance reception of TC as tropes for understanding such concerns. Tudor…
Explores de Worde's multiple uses of the same woodcut (a depiction of an exchange of rings) in various books he produced. Found twice in de Worde's TC, the woodcut may reflect his reception of TC via the summary of it in John Skelton's "Phyllyp…
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…
Prints handwritten summaries from a copy of the 1550 edition of Chaucer's works (Cambridge University Library Peterborough B.6.13) and discusses their usefulness for a history of the literary argument, documenting one reader's response to CT and…
Discusses the idea of the anthology as a fundamental characteristic of medieval literature, using CT as an example because individual tales were often copied into other anthologies.
Lerer, Seth.
University of Toronto Quarterly 73: 906-15, 2004
Comments on Thomas and Lewis as Chaucer's sons and explores Astr as a didactic treatise, part of Chaucer's "Macrobean" development from "literary study to moral inquiry."
