In calling the GP Miller a "knarre," Chaucer probably draws on an iconographic tradition illustrated in a pilgrim badge depicting a boar playing a bagpipe and inscribed "Laet knorren."
Shimogasa, Tokuji.
Hiroshima Studies in English Language and Literature 25 (1980): 13-28.
Several Middle English adverbs of affirmation ("ywis," "wytterly," "sikerly," and "verayment") found in many medieval romances and in many of Chaucer's works function primarily as words of elaboration.
Lawton, David A., ed.
Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell & Brewer, 1982.
Essays by various hands on contexts for the alliterative revival, metrical and historical backgrounds, sources, manuscripts, audience, and the poems themselves.
Marshall, Simone Celine.
Notes and Queries 264 (2019): 90-91.
Describes scholarly inattention to the Middle English texts of KnT, NPT, WBT, and The Flower and the Leaf in John Dryden's "Fables Ancient and Modern" (1700) "slightly edited" from Thomas Speght's 1598 edition. Observes that the texts are "the…
Gray, Douglas.
Thomas G. Duncan, ed. A Companion to the Middle English Lyric (Woodbridge, Suffolk, and Rochster, N.Y.: D. S. Brewer, 2005), pp. 120-49.
Sketches the French backgrounds and courtly functions of late medieval English lyrics, surveying representative samples from Chaucer, Gower, Hoccleve, Lydgate, Charles d'Orléans, Skelton, the Findern manuscript, and Humphrey Newton's collection.…
Reed, Thomas L.,Jr.
Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 1990.
A prominent feature of Middle English debate poetry from 1200 to 1450 is irresolution, a quality appreciated in the context of carnival laughter (Bakhtin). Reed rejects univocal interpretation through allegory or symbolism in favor of "experiential…
McIntosh, Angus, M. L. Samuels, and Margaret Laing.
Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1989.
Eighteen essays on dialects, scribes, transmission, word geography, and related topics. Only one essay has not been previously published: Margaret Laing's "Linguistic Profiles and Textual Criticism: The Translations by Richard Misyn of Rolle's…
The rare pre-Chaucerian fabliaux in English display affinities with exempla, drama, and inverted romance. Critics have long pondered why no fabliau tradition in English exists; they hypothesize scribal prudery or loss of many texts. Considering the…
Leahy, Conor.
Review of English Studies 70, no. 295 (2019): 527-49.
Assesses references and allusions to Middle English in poetry written by W. H. Auden between 1922 and 1930, including echoes of GP, MilT, and BD in "The Mill (Hempstead)" and "April in a Town," and perhaps TC and NPT in "Troy Town."
Gray, Douglas.
Alan Deyermond, ed. A Century of British Medieval Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 2007), pp. 383-426.
Gray surveys the study of Middle English literature from the founding of the British Academy until the early twenty-first century, commenting on accomplishments of individual scholars up to World War II. He describes critical trends and how they…
An introduction to critical approaches to Middle English literature, featuring twenty-two reprinted examples of critical methods by various authors. Chapters include authorship; textual form; genre; language, style and rhetoric; allegory;…
Surveys the forms, topics, and contexts of Middle English writing, clarifying its construction from various literary traditions set against a number of social, economic, and political conditions. The discussion is divided into five broad categories…
Collects forty-five documents and images as backgrounds to fourteenth- and fifteenth-century English literature; arranged under seven headings and keyed (by chart) to a variety of canonical Middle English literary texts. All of the selected texts are…
Burrow, J. A., ed.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989.
Includes nine Sir Israel Gollancz Memorial Lectures delivered since 1950, and one on Scots delivered in 1942. Reprints Dorothy Everett's "Some Reflections on Chaucer's Art Poetical" (1950), Derek Brewer's "Towards a Chaucerian Poetic" (1974), and…
Gorst, Emma Kate Charters.
Dissertation Abstracts International A77.06 (2016): n.p.
Investigates two "networks of meaning" within which to view late medieval English lyrics: the relationships among lyrics in manuscript collections (using "network mapping software") and the relationships between embedded lyrics and "narrative events"…
Boffey, Julia, and Christiania Whitehead, eds.
Cambridge: Brewer, 2018
Includes twenty essays by various authors and an introduction by the editors, examining textual, contextual, aesthetic, and cultural issues that relate to a wide variety of English lyrics from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century. For three essays…
