The Wife's "long-winded autobiography" in WBP--a "wishful, wistful self-serving fantasy" and "long, stupendous performance" that seems to "thrill to the idea" of rape--reflects her personality through its "touchiness and pugnacity," "garrulous…
Compares carnivalesque elements of WBPT to performance techniques of modern, unruly, "women on top" comediennes such as Roseanne Barr and female impersonators such as Barry Humphries (Dame Edna Everage).
Scala, Elizabeth.
Film History 29.1-2: 34-45, 1999.
Argues that the 1990 film Pretty Woman is understandable as an analogue to medieval Fair Unknown romances and that, like WBT, the film affirms and inverts the ideology of romance through self-conscious nostalgia.
Examines the use of Abelardian "sic et non" analysis in Mel as a demonstration of the "futility of arguing from Authority." In Mel, the sense of futility may be inadvertent, but in WBP it results from conscious parody of authoritarian argument.…
Blake, N. F.
Irma Taavitsainen, Gunnel Melchers, and Päivi Pahta, eds. Writing in Nonstandard English (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: J. Benjamins, 1999), pp. 123-50.
Assesses the northernisms in RvT and the speech of the bastard in Shakespeare's King John as examples of "nonstandard" language in a time when a standard was only developing. In both pronunciation and lexicon, the northernisms of RvT "should perhaps…
Ueshima, Yasuo.
Hisayuki Sasamoto et al., eds. Hearts to the English-American Language and Literature: Essays Presented to Emeritus Professor Sutezo Hirose in Honour of His 88th Birthday (Osaka: Osaka Kyoiku Tosho, 1999), pp. 59-68. (In Japanese).
Documents Chaucer's uses of northern dialect in RvT and assesses their effects.
Caie, Graham D.
Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 100: 175-85, 1999.
The extensive and apparently authorial glosses that accompany MLT often underscore contradictions-spiritual against material, internal against external, ascetic against monetary-between Innocent's treatise and the narrator's perspective; these…
Caie, Graham D.
Geoffrey Lester, ed. Chaucer in Perspective: Middle English Essays in Honour of Norman Blake (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1999), pp. 47-60.
Examines several glosses to MLT to argue that the "glossator's aim is to show the reader how the narrator manipulates texts," helping us to realize that the Man of Law is too interested in "things of this world and is spiritually lacking."
MLT can be seen as an exposition and justification of the medieval Christian providential view of history. The concern with exemplifying this theory governs the teller's choice of source and emphasis. It is ironic that the Tale's philosophy can be…
Chaucer uses East and West to signify differences in storytelling in MLT: chivalric vs. travel romance; hagiography vs. history; linear narrative vs. apostrophe and prayer. Chaucer leads his readers to see the Tale as "trapped in Western chauvinism,"…
Taavitsainen, Irma.
Geoffrey Lester, ed. Chaucer in Perspective: Middle English Essays in Honour of Norman Blake (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1999), pp. 218-34.
Pragmatic analysis of linguistic features that produce "personal affect" in several of the CT. Uses features such as exclamations, oaths, and aspects of proximity and reader involvement to describe characterizations of the Knight, the Prioress, the…
Thompson, N. S.
Piero Boitani and Anna Torti, eds. The Body and the Soul in Medieval Literature (Woodbridge, Suffolk; Rochester, N.Y.: D. S. Brewer, 1999), pp. 17-29.
CT and Boccaccio's Decameron depict a variety of social and moral transgressions committed by male characters; these transgressions constitute the ills of society. Female characters in the works are less likely to be transgressive, and only female…
Thundy, Zacharias P.
Michigan Academician 31: 385-99, 1999.
Using scientific chaos theory to clarify the changeable complexity of CT, Thundy argues that disunity is a fundamental feature of the work. Also argues that the Persian poem Manteq-at-Tair ("Language" or "Parliament" of the Birds), by Farid-ad-Din…
Report of a pedagogical experiment in which online interactive computer software enabled students to assume roles of the Canterbury pilgrims. The experiment sought to emphasize Chaucer's rhetorical qualities, but the results reinforced the dramatic…
Wilcockson, Colin.
Review of English Studies 50: 345-50, 1999.
The initial thirty-four lines of GP divide into two sections of sixteen lines joined by a couplet and emphasized by capitalization in the Ellesmere manuscript. The first section treats general matters; the second, particulars. Chaucer structures the…
Fleming, John V.
Susan J. Ridyard, ed. Chivalry, Knighthood, and War in the Middle Ages (Sewanee, Tenn.: University of the South, 1999), pp. 137-50.
Details of the GP description of the Knight reflect the ascetic ideal of knighthood promoted by Bernard of Clairvaux in Liber ad milites templi. Chaucer's Knight is by no means a Templer, but the description harkens back to a related view, perhaps…
Fowler, Elizabeth.
Barbara A. Hanawalt and David Wallace, eds. Medieval Crime and Social Control (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), pp.124-42.
Reads KnT as an example of Chaucer's "deliberative mode," whereby the reader is compelled to perceive or decide a choice. KnT deliberates whether conquest or consent is the proper source of monarchical dominion. Through pointed occupatio and the…
Hanning, Robert W.
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 21: 29-58, 1999.
Assesses how MLH and MLP reflect the anxiety of Chaucer's poetics-how they indicate Chaucer's awareness that he is both following and improving upon the poetic model of Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron and the "penitential" poetics of John Gower's…
Jacobs, Kathryn.
Publications of the Medieval Association of the Midwest 6: 25-33, 1999.
Identifies the legal features of the lovers' pacts in CT. Legal diction (e.g., "accord"), careful preparation, and various kinds of delay connect the illicit relations in MilT, WBPT, ShT, MerT, RvT, and others with the legal contract of marriage.
Chaucer evinces awareness of marriage law, in particular the necessity of a church ceremony to secure property rights. Wives with a legally unassailable right to property (May in MerT, the Wife of Bath, Alisoun in MilT, Cecilie in SNT) are in a much…
The Miller is a stereotypical Celt, disparaged by society; Oswald the Reeve is an Anglo-Saxon who resents the Celtic Miller's "specialized trade." The Prioress is distanced from secular society by her profession and distanced from her profession by…
Nolan, Barbara.
Piero Boitani and Anna Torti, eds. The Body and the Soul in Medieval Literature (Woodbridge, Suffolk; Rochester, N.Y.: D. S. Brewer, 1999), pp. 79-105.
Comments on similarities between the mixture of bawdy and sublime in CT and in other medieval tales, collections, and contexts, exploring how bawdiness challenges official discourse. Examines at length Henri d'Andeli's aristocratic fabliau,…
