Browse Items (16470 total)

Mertens-Fonck, Paule.   Marie-Françoise Alamichel, ed. La complmentarité: Mélanges offerts à Josseline Bidard et Arlette Sancery à l'occasion de leur départ en retraite (SAC 29 [2007], no. 85), pp.177-85.
Two intertwined debates underlie CT: 1) a tension between traditional literature and individualizing contemporary details, and 2) the realist/nominalist debate over universals.

Laidlaw, Martin.   Marina Gerzic and Aiden Norrie, eds. From Medievalism to Early-Modernism: Adapting the English Past (New York: Routledge, 2018), pp. 52-66.
Assesses the emphases of four modern adaptations of CT: Brian Helgeland's 2001 movie "A Knight's Tale" (focusing on Chaucer's character as a "PR" man); the 2011–12 Tacit Theatre touring drama "The Canterbury Tales" (bawdy comedy); Pier Paolo…

Wells, Marion A.   Marion A. Wells. Gender, Affect, and Emotion from Classical to Early Modern Literature: Afterlives of the Nightingale's Song (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023), pp. 145-94.
Argues that "Petrarch's Stoicization of Boccaccio's" story of Griselda "constucts an ideal of apatheia predicated on the forcible interruption of the . . . internal process of assent," and that Chaucer's re-vernacularization of the tale "uses the…

Crane, Susan.   Marion Turner, ed. A Handbook of Middle English Studies (Chichester: Wiley, 2013), pp. 123-34.
Describes "critical animal studies"; then examines human-animal relations in PrT and NPT, arguing that the Prioress's "selective sympathy for certain animals" in her GP description "forecasts her narrow sympathy for certain humans" in her Tale. NPT,…

Gillespie, Vincent.   Marion Turner, ed. A Handbook of Middle English Studies (Chichester: Wiley, 2013), pp. 137-54.
Describes classical and medieval concerns with authorial intention and readerly control, commenting on Dante, the "Roman de la Rose," Hoccleve, and Lydgate in particular, and exploring how and where in HF Chaucer "puts in the spotlight the…

Coleman, Joyce.   Marion Turner, ed. A Handbook of Middle English Studies (Chichester: Wiley, 2013), pp. 155-69. 2 b&w figs.
Outlines an "ethnography of reading" and describes "audienceship" as a field of study of "how people actually read (and heard) texts," including examples drawn from Chaucer's fiction and its reception. Closes with a brief survey of reading and…

Gillespie, Alexandra.   Marion Turner, ed. A Handbook of Middle English Studies (Chichester: Wiley, 2013), pp. 171-85. 1 b&w fig.
Assesses relations between the "idealizing tendencies" of formalist literary studies and the practicalities of studies in book history, reading PF as a "Chaucerian theory of the book" that is similar to the theory of Maurice Blanchot. Explores how a…

Prendergast, Thomas A.   Marion Turner, ed. A Handbook of Middle English Studies (Chichester: Wiley, 2013), pp. 239-51.
Summarizes traditional historical arguments for the centrality of Chaucer in the formation of the canon of Middle English literature, identifying "identical aesthetic qualities between Chaucer and the modern" as fundamental to this perspective, and…

Matthews, David.   Marion Turner, ed. A Handbook of Middle English Studies (Chichester: Wiley, 2013), pp. 253-66.
Considers the value and possible necessity of periodization in history and literary history, focusing on particular difficulties in dealing with the use of "middle" in "Middle Ages" and "Middle English," and arguing that treatments of Chaucer, Gower,…

Mills, Robert.   Marion Turner, ed. A Handbook of Middle English Studies (Chichester: Wiley, 2013), pp. 269-83.
Describes sovereignty in CT (particularly ParsT) as "a legitimate means of exercising power, distributed hierarchically but founded on the idea of mutual responsibility and equality in the eyes of God." Explores how, in light of this concept,…

Davis, Isabel.   Marion Turner, ed. A Handbook of Middle English Studies (Chichester: Wiley, 2013), pp. 285-98.
Explores Middle English nuances of a set of related concepts: class, estate, identity, calling, and "clayme," investigating them in light of Pauline distinctions between use and possession and between old and new, discussed by Giorgio Agamben.…

Hsy, Jonathan.   Marion Turner, ed. A Handbook of Middle English Studies (Chichester: Wiley, 2013), pp. 315-29.
Considers cities as a "mode of thought" for critical analysis, describing a walk-through pedestrian perspective and a from-on-high omniscient perspective in late-medieval English works that include "The Stores of the Cities," "St. Erkenwald," and HF,…

Scala, Elizabeth.   Marion Turner, ed. A Handbook of Middle English Studies (Chichester: Wiley, 2013), pp. 49-62.
Argues that "Desire-as-impasse is the human condition" in KnT, exploring how readers' "reading backward" from the end of the tale--seeking to fulfill the "desire for signification"--parallels the efforts of Arcite and Palamon to articulate their own…

Lawton, David.   Marion Turner, ed. A Handbook of Middle English Studies (Chichester: Wiley, 2013), pp. 93-107.
Theorizes "public interiorities" in terms of literary voice, Augustinian self-awareness, and Jürgen Habermus's conceptualization of the "public sphere," discussing them as expressions or perceptions of stances or outlooks that are neither universal…

Wynne-Davies, Marion.   Marion Wynne-Davies. Women and Arthurian Literature: Seizing the Sword (New York: St. Martin's, 1996), pp. 14-35.
While the Wife of Bath's character is proto-feminist, the rape of the maiden and the submission of the woman at the end of WBT point to a dominate patriarchal attitude. By embedding Arthurian myth into WBT and presenting the Wife as a fictional…

Phillips, Helen.   Marios Costambeys, Andrew Hamer, and Martin Heale, eds. The Making of the Middle Ages: Liverpool Essays. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007, pp. 71-92.
Phillips gauges Romantic responses to LGW and the "Flower and the Leaf" (attributed to Chaucer in the Romantic age), indicating that Keats, Tennyson, William Morris, Pre-Raphaelite artists, and others admired the poems for their depictions of Nature…

Ovitt, George,Jr.   Mark Amsler, ed. Creativity and the Imagination: Case Studies from the Classical Age to the Twentieth Century (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1987): pp. 34-58.
Written for "Lyte Lowys" (Chaucer's son), Astr is a concise, brilliant translation of Masha'allah's "De compositione et utilitate astrolabii." Chaucer best displays his comprehension in his definitions of the equinoctial. Although written for a…

Garner, Lori Ann.   Mark C. Amodio, ed. New Directions in Oral Theory (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2005), pp.255-77.
Contrasts uses of proverbs in TC and in "Havelock the Dane." In the latter, proverbs affirm traditional wisdom and elicit the reader's trust. Chaucer uses proverbs in more complex ways, presenting them as contradictions or in striking juxtapositions…

Arnovick, Leslie K.   Mark C. Amodio, ed. Oral Poetics in Middle English Poetry (New York and London: Garland, 1994), pp. 125-47.
In light of linguistic, legal, and folkloric traditions, Dorigen's speech to Aurelius in the garden--a moment of dialogue within the larger dialogue of the pilgrims--does not constitute a promise. Rashly made promises were not considered legally…

Parks, Ward.   Mark C. Amodio, ed. Oral Poetics in Middle English Poetry (New York and London: Garland, 1994), pp. 149-79.
The tension between literacy and orality--evident throughout CT--can be seen in GP, where a literate and learned Chaucer positions himself as the mere recorder of oral performance. Th satirizes the English metrical romance, a genre deeply rooted in…

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…

Cannon, Christopher.   Mark Chinca, Timo Reuvekamp-Felber, and Christopher Young, eds. Mittelalterliche Novellistik im Europäischen Kontext: Kulturwissenschaftliche Perspektiven (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 2006), pp. 326-46.
Cannon explores the critique in MilT of the limited Boethianism of KnT. The double plot of MilT and its emphasis on turning harm to joke are more genuinely Boethian than is the tragic emphasis of KnT.

Taylor, Candace Hull.   Mark Cruse, ed. Performance and Theatricality in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance ([Turnhout]: Brepols, 2018), pp. 17-34.
Considers the performative aspects of Prudence as an allegorical figure in "Sawles Warde," where she functions as a dramatic "expositor," and in Mel, where she offers "commentary . . . on reading, misreading, and the limits of wisdom when it is…

Bodden, M. C.   Mark D. Meyerson, Daniel Thiery, and Oren Falk, eds. 'A Great Effusion of Blood'? Interpreting Medieval Violence (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2004), pp. 216-40.
Bodden reads ClT as Chaucer's deconstruction of the violence of hagiography. Plot and purported allegory clash in the Tale, and Walter is concerned not with Griselda's obedience but with her outward show. Virtue without will is no virtue at all. The…

Tomasch, Sylvia.   Mark L. Greenberg and Lance Schachterle, eds. Literature and Technology (Bethlehem, Penn.: Lehigh University Press, 1992), pp. 66-98.
Theseus's attempts to impose order upon his world reveal Chaucer's familiarity with medieval cartographical constructs as well as their underlying intellectual visions and political motives. This is most apparent in the construction of Theseus's…
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