Browse Items (16470 total)

Assesses Chaucer's transformation of ClT in his process of translating his sources, focusing on the imagery of clothing. Through his alterations of the clothing motif, Chaucer disclaims the traditional notion that translation is merely superficial…

Both ClT and Kingston's "No Name Woman" reveal how patriarchal culture operates to disguise male complicity in women's repression, and both connect issues of knowledge and power with the construction of subjectivity, showing how these are intimately…

The concept of piety was complex and problematic during the Middle Ages, and Chaucer's refusal to align himself with one side or the other in ClT is distressing. Griselda is neither a paradigm for lay sanctity nor an ironic or satiric character.

MerT is a direct response to passus 9 of the B version of Piers Plowman, presenting an "unkyndely similitude" of marriage in contrast to the ideal expressed in Langland's poem.

From the perspective of medieval psychology, January's pretensions to youth and sexual vigor are ridiculous and potentially fatal, since his sexual overactivity diminishes vital spirits and causes, among other effects, blindness and eventually death.

January's comparison of looking for a bride to reflections in a mirror evokes associations of limited and distorted vision, of two-dimensional representations, and of reversals of left and right. This image of "imperfect vision" is reflected in…

Suggests that Spenser was influenced by the structure of SqT as well as by its subject matter.

Argues that the "horizon of expectations" (a concept derived from Hans Jauss) of FranT is never fulfilled by the narrative. Although the Franklin strives to meet social and generic expectations, he leaves his Tale open-ended--Chaucer's means of…

Chaucer's somewhat unusual association of his Franklin with food may reflect the frequent migration of the Exchequer from Westminster to York and the prioritizing of the York food trade as a result. The Franklin may have been a York franklin who…

Like Boccaccio in Il Filocolo, Chaucer in FranT contrasts men and women by emphasizing men's mobility and women's fixity. Men are depicted as publicly and physically active, while women are privately and intellectually active.

FranT is set in a pre-Christian age, but Dorigen prays to God and thus achieves the status of a good pagan. She is portrayed as an individual rather than a socially rule-bound wife. Chaucer celebrates individuality through her, but he also recognizes…

Works such as Pearl, PhyT, PrT, and Lydgate's Siege of Thebes present children as transgressive social agents whom society represses through ill treatment to stabilize traditional hierarchies.

Both CYPT and the "Book of Margery Kempe" raise questions about community and selfhood. In each, an individual criticizes his or her community to the members of a different, markedly less local community. The two texts suggest the precariousness of…

Alphabetical arrangement of alchemical terms and images from "ablution" to "zephyr." The entries define the terms and illustrate the images, citing works in which they appear, including CYPT.

Views SNT as a "generic experiment" built "upon an epistemological premise whose axiomatic status was crumbling." Discusses analogical, hermeneutical, and hagiographic elements of the "Tale" as well.

Chaucer's choice of this version of the saint's life allows him to portray the interests of a female teller and to fuse masculine and feminine ideals. We hear Cecilia's strident voice and experience her powers of articulation. Further, the hair shirt…

The dissonant echoes within and between Chauntecleer's dream narrative and the subsequent disputatio prevent any clear idea of the veracity of the dream's apparently prophetic nature. In the confrontation between the cock and the fox, the dogmatism…

In the opening of NPT, Chaucer investigates the exemplary form, both honoring the aesthetic persuasion of Geoffrey of Vinsauf and of Horace and-through parody-undercutting prescriptive notions that narrative must have a predominant sense and readers'…

Differences between NPT and Roman de Renart indicate how Chaucer's 'Tale' depicts a mock-heroic masculinity through its scenes with the cock and the hen and the cock and the fox, as well as in the chase scene.

Prints the lyric "My lefe ys faren in a lond," referred to by Chaucer in NPT 7.2879.

The vivid details of Decameron 7.3 (the story of Friar Rinaldo)-the corrupt clergy, their obesity and sweating faces, their rich foods and wine, together with the simplicity of the widow's life-suggest that Boccaccio's work may have inspired NPT as a…

Surveys attempts to explain how MkT is appropriate to the Monk as teller, and cites examples from monastic preaching of associations of "the monastic profession and an interest in historical examples of misfortune."

Assesses Chaucer's alterations of his sources (Jean de Meun and Boethius) in the Nero account of MkT. Through selection and emphasis, especially emphasis on clothing, Chaucer "forges a link between the emperor's name and his deeds," associating Nero…

MkT critiques secular masculinity, represented by the Host and the Knight; their comments about the Tale disclose more about themselves than about the Tale or its teller. Against these two figures, the "Monk remains a figure of resistance."

Places Mel in the context of Richard II and his detractors in the 1380s and 1390s and examines the competing kinds of masculinity in the Tale as argued by Prudence and allegorized in the character of Sophie.