Browse Items (16470 total)

Chaucer's rhyming of "sike" with "endite" (TC 2.884 and 2.886) is likely a scribal mistake."Lite" is more consistent with Chaucer's linguistic habits and forms a perfect rhyme. In line 2.936, "yeden" is placed to rhyme with "dede," while an…

Discusses the exegetical tradition of the passage in Lamentations that lies behind TC 5.540-53, linking Boccaccio, Dante, and Chaucer with that tradition.

TC may usefully be regarded as a utopian fiction that attempts to repress undesirable historical events by situating itself at a time before those events, thus opening up a moment of freedom in which the hope for a different, better future is…

Teaching in the humanities should entail continual reconstituting of relevance. Detailed analysis of the portraits of Briseis/Criseyde in the "Roman de Troie," TC, and the "Testament of Cresseid"--even apart from the long works in which they…

Examines how Chaucer manipulates the conventions of the "descriptio" in TC, arguing that he capitalizes on its metaliterary potential. Chaucer gives texture to the descriptio of Criseyde by spreading it throughout several portions of the narrative.…

Knowing Boethian philosophy (as Chaucer intended his audience to do) enables the reader of TC to gain a double perspective, both inside and outside the temporal limits of the text. This position is analogous to God's position and allows one to…

The key to the character of Pandarus lies in French domestic romances, especially their concern with privacy. Both TC and "La Chastelaine" portray lovers as vulnerable human beings who have the right to freedom from invasive forces. Pandarus's…

Assesses Criseyde in TC and other widowed protagonists in medieval romances (Roman de Thèbes, Chértien's Yvain), exploring how "necessity of possession and ideals of chastity" are the prevailing stereotypes of the literary tradition. Unlike…

Examines the dawn songs (aubades) in TC and Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet" as elaborate versions of the linguistic category of parting or separation. Both dawn songs assert consolidation and assuage possible feelings of rejection; they also…

Examines adaptations of conventional depictions of change in literary characters--in works by Chrétien de Troyes, Marie de France, and Benoît de Sainte-Maure. Contrasts the change in Benoît's Briseida with that in Chaucer's Criseyde, focusing…

Reassesses details of Chaucer's Scog and of Scogan's Moral Balade in light of their historical context, intertextual relations, manuscript variants, and scribal graffiti, arguing that Scogan's poem reflects familiarity with several of Chaucer's…

Traces the development of body-soul relations in Western intellectual tradition as they are reflected in LGW, in book 1 of Edmund Spenser's "Faerie Queene," and in Richard Burton's "Anatomy of Melancholy." Uses St. Augustine as a point of departure…

Analyzes evidence of readership found in fifteenth-century copies of LGW, including its placement in anthologies, poems with which it is associated, and evidence of female names in LGW manuscripts. Infrequently excerpted, the poem was seldom mined…

This line from PF has been taken to mean that the "stare" (magpie) divulges secrets, or betrays. However, "bewrye" can also mean "cover up," suggesting that the bird knows "how to keep a secret." Such a nuance could also apply to TC; Troilus's…

PF is an epithalamium. Epithalamia are not always occasioned by human marriages; they do affirm the heavenly benediction and public recognition of marriage and celebrate the cycle of procreation; they contain "fescennine" verses, which poke fun at…

PF represents an "oedipal moment"--a psychological suspension between the "male-dominated civilization of Africanus ('culture,' in a word)" and the "female-dominated love-garden of Nature and Venus ('nature')." The narrator stands "on the brink of…

Argues that Jürgen Habermas's concept of the "public sphere" shares features with Chaucer's notion of "commune profit" in PF. Both concepts suggest or insist that the political body must be open and generative, cognizant of the physical as well as…

Using Freudian and Lacanian analysis, examines BD, ultimately "suggest[ing] that Chaucer used courtly love and the figure of Fortune to develop a poetics of tragic interiority that was decisive for the artificing of 'life' in subsequent periods."

Traces the influence of medieval medical texts on the understanding of the bodily causes of dreaming, arguing that the dreamer's body plays an important role in dreams. In BD, the dream works to masculinize and "heterosexualize" the ailing narrator,…

Chaucer's reference to "ferses twelve" in BD remains a tantalizing problem. He may have been thinking of a non-standard version of chess, such as the Courier game, which includes twelve pawns; or the narrator may be thinking of draughts. In any case,…

Though BD is highly structured, ambiguity pervades it, raising questions about the relationships between dreaming and writing, illusory experience and textual reality, and psychological emptiness and poetic fruition.

Twelve chapters assess why so many poets have been drawn to Ovid's Metamorphoses as a source of inspiration. Although its intrinsic richness and complexity provided the original impetus for its popularity, its permeation of so much English literature…

To find his own poetic voice, Chaucer's dreamer in HF impersonates the non-canonical subjectivities and voices of women and animals in the form of Dido, the eagle, and the monster-woman Fame. By doing so, he turns away from masculine literary…

Assesses similarities and differences between the two Prologues to LGW and the portrayal of Cupid in the Dido account, examining the power relations between Cupid and Alceste and, beyond this microstructure, the masculine-feminine relations of the…

Argues that in the LGW account of Lucrece (a tale of enforced copulation), Chaucer uses the word "myght" as a noun, a verb, and a copula to suggest the ultimate triumph of the heroine's seductive rhetoric. The story is less about rape than about…