Hanna, Ralph.
Corinne Saunders, ed. A Companion to Medieval Poetry ((Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), pp. 196-215.
Hanna discusses late medieval English "textual culture," commenting on the production and disposition of manuscripts, habits of collecting and anthologizing individual works, the vagaries of manuscript survival, reading practices, etc. Cites examples…
Saunders, Corinne J., and Richard Lawrie, with Laurie Atkinson, eds.
Leiden: Brill, 2022.
Seventeen essays by various authors on topics in Middle English manuscripts, their legacies, and the career of Ian Doyle, with an introduction by Saunders and Lawrie, an afterword by Linne Mooney and Derek Pearsall, a list of Doyle's publications by…
Williams, Tara.
University Park: Penn State University Press, 2018.
Presents a multidisciplinary "theory of the marvelous" in Middle English literature. Focuses on how fourteenth-century texts, including CT, "represent a coherent and previously unrecognized theory of the marvelous, one focused on the intersection of…
Fifteen essays by various authors from the 1994 conference on Middle English held in Rydzyna, Poland. Individual essays consider lexicographical topics such as Middle English sexual vocabulary, plant names, and words associated with fate;…
Walter, Katie.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.
Explores the transgressive and reparative potential of the mouth in medieval thinking--scientific, pastoral, and literary (especially "Piers Plowman"). Includes no sustained attention to Chaucer's works, but the index lists nearly forty references to…
Sixteen essays from the Eighth York Manuscript Conference (July 5-7, 1996) on issues in Middle English textual studies: dating, punctuation, meter, scribal practice, and book production, among others. Includes a preface (xi-xii) that celebrates…
Galloway, Andrew.
David F. Johnson and Elaine Treharne, eds. Readings in Medieval Texts: Interpreting Old and Middle English Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 288-305.
Galloway examines the claims to authority--traditional and innovative--found in prologues to Middle English works, with special attention to Chaucer's HF, LGWP, GP, and other prologues in CT (e.g., WBP). The essay identifies four types of prologues…
Minkova, Donka.
Irma Taavitsainen, Terttu Nevalainen, Päivi Pahta, and Matti Rissanen, eds. Placing Middle English in Context (Berlin and New York: Gruyter, 2000), pp. 431-59.
Surveys critical discussion of the prosodic behavior of Romance loan words in Middle English, challenging the Halle/Keyser analysis and the reliability of rhyme. Providing examples from alliterative poetry, Chaucer, and Henryson, Minkova argues that…
Bower, Hannah.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022.
Explores relations between the practical purposes of medieval medical recipes and their imaginative and aesthetic effects, focusing on how the texts of these recipes reflect their broader discursive culture, c. 1375-1500. Cites Chaucer's recurrent…
Mahoney, Dhira B.
Douglas Kelly, ed. The Medieval "Opus": Imitation, Rewriting, and Transmission in the French Tradition. (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1996), pp. 405-27.
Discusses medieval English translation of Christine's works, focusing on Hoccleve's translation of "L'Epistre au Dieu d'Amours." Also considers the influence of LGW on Hoccleve's translation.
Brewer, Derek.
Mary-Jo Arn, and Hanneke Wirtjes, eds. Historical and Editorial Studies in Medieval and Early Modern English (Groningen: Wolters-Nordhoff, 1985), pp. 37-47.
Rebuts use of audience to privilege interpretation in Middle English romances. Rather than representing a historically authentic event, the Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, MS 61 frontispiece of Chaucer reading to a court audience may be merely a…
Studies how recollection is achieved through physical, cognitive, and interpretive challenges. Uses examples from Chaucer's romances to explore individual and collective memory processes, discussing memory in KnT, BD, and TC.
A study of five Middle English lists of romances, including the list in Chaucer's Th (7.897-902). Liu uses the "prototype theory of categorization" from cognitive linguistics to provide the rationale for a flexible yet rigorous definition of the…
Covers 88 verse romances, including "Gamelyn," and 20 prose romances; equipped with an author index and preceded by general studies--definition, genre, Alexander romances, alliterative poetry, Arthurian literature, Breton lay, chivalry, convention,…
Riddy, Felicity.
Roberta L. Krueger, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Romance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 235-52.
Sets Middle English romances "in the context of late medieval patterns of family and marriage, and presents them as part of a literate but unlearned lay culture centered on the home." Briefly discusses Thop and TC.
Burlin proposes a structuralist model for the medieval romance, adopting a Saussurean paradigm of intersecting axes: the "paradigmatic axis furnished with the test and courtly codes and the syntagmatic axis with the quest and the test." Includes…
Speed, Diane, ed.
Sydney: Department of English, University of Sydney, 1989.
Correction and update of 1987 edition. Volume 1 includes a general introduction and bibliography, plus texts and introductions to Havelok, Sir Orfeo, Chevelere Assigne, Sir Cleges, Rauf Coilyear, and The Grene Knight. Volume 2 includes explanatory…
Redford, Michael.
Paula Fikkert and Haike Jacobs, eds. Development in Prosodic Systems (Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2003), pp. 159-95.
Redford analyzes Chaucerian evidence pertaining to Middle English words that "appear to have initial stress" in certain contexts and "final stress in others." Examines several prominent theories and explanations, arguing that meter can be useful in…
Gray, Douglas, and E. G. Stanley, eds.
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983.
A collection of essays on Chaucer; the career of Davis; "Piers Plowman;" a poem to William Waynflete, Bishop of Winchester;the printing of medieval texts; Jocelin of Brakelond; ME linguistics; and clocks and dials. For six essays that pertain to…
Meier, Hans H.
Michael Benskin and M. L. Samuels, eds. So Meny People, Longages and Tonges: Philological Essays in Scots and Mediaeval English Presented to Angus McIntosh (Edinburgh: Authors, 1981), pp. 367-76.
Deals with Charles d'Orleans and Chaucer's use of Dante.
Machan, Tim William.
A. J. Minnis and Charlotte Brewer, eds. Crux and Controversy in Middle English Textual Criticism (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1992), pp. 1-18.
Challenges traditional distinctions between "auctor" and "scribe," associating their strict separation with New Criticism and affiliating it, in turn, with the methods of George Kane. Calls for a textual method sensitive to medieval notions of…
Yoshikawa, Fumiko.
Michiko Ogura, ed. Textual and Contextual Studies in Medieval English: Towards the Reunion of Linguistics and Philology (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2006), pp. 205-16.
Yoshikawa studies Middle English verbs with both reflexive and impersonal uses in ten typical situations, considering Chaucer's uses of "menen" and "remembren" as examples where semantic value and the nature of the participants affect usage.
Killough, George [B.]
Text: Transactions of the Society for Textual Scholarship 3 (1987): 183-209.
Analyzes mid-line virgules as punctuation in a number of manuscripts of Middle English verse, concluding that the practice was neither tied to native alliterative meter nor strikingly unusual. The practice was erratic, and seems to have been scribal…
Sylvester, Louise, and Jane Roberts.
Cambridge : D. S. Brewer, 2000.
An annotated bibliography of studies that pertain to Middle English words and word groups, especially studies that go beyond information available in the Middle English Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary. Includes studies of lexicon, word…
