Browse Items (16470 total)

In an argument that medieval writers gendered undesirable aspects of pagan beliefs as feminine, Shutters examines Griselda in ClT.

By representing the narrator of CT first as a disembodied authority and then as a storyteller in the pilgrimage game, Chaucer explores the parameters of voice, gender, and authority. The perception of gender in speech is shown to be a social…

Investigates two crucial scenes of reading in TC--Criseyde's reading with her attendants in Book 2 and Pandarus's voyeuristic reading of a romance in the consummation scene--finding in their contrasts two opposed models of reading: one that…

Argues that MerT is unified by its engagement with medieval debate tradition, evident in a series of five episodes that concern competing views on gender and marriage. Moreover, the "phantom debate" of the Merchant's "split consciousness" and the…

Uses Chaucer's works, Mannyng's "Handlyng Sinne," and several Middle English romances to examine conversion as a process by which the self is redefined either in opposition to a dominant class or as a means of admission to it.

Ten essays by various authors on topics in Middle English and Anglo-Norman studies, with an introduction by the editors and a comprehensive index. For three essays that pertain to Chaucer, search for Gender, Poetry, and the Form of Thought in Later…

O'Neill surveys Chaucer's attitudes toward age and gender in CT, with particular focus on WBPT. In CT, the "medieval, ageing Englishwoman as a sexual being emerges with . . . dignity and vitality."

Eaton connects various uses of the word "conscience" in Chaucer's works with the social classes of the characters with whom the word is associated and with gender differences such as the structuring of physical space.

Chaucer satirizes the anti-Semitism and sexual restrictiveness of the medieval church by presenting the serpent-Satan as a representation of Judaic reproduction denied the celibate Prioress. Rudat suggests the Prioress terminated an earlier unwanted…

Thomas W. Ross's "Variorum Edition" of MilT creates new possibilities for interpreting the misdirected kiss.

Observes tensions between masculine, political responsibilities Troilus has to his state and feminized submissiveness to his "sovereyn" Criseyde, grounding these tensions in medieval critiques of courtly love and aligning Troilus's submission with…

In contrast to the uniformity specified in LGWP, the legends themselves, when examined in light of the nominalist principle of particularized language, reveal widely differing heroines, not indistinguishable victims. ShT functions as pattern; CYT as…

Chaucer's male narrators and characters are obsessed with ideas of linear/finite time, progression, arrival, and teleology. His female characters either silently subscribe to the male obsession or are dominated by cyclical/monumental and transcendent…

Professional book production and circulation in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, including Chauceriana, present courtly models for gender, eventually affecting rural gentry. The Findern MS revises femininity, and the female voice can be…

Examines "the semantics and pragmatics of nouns that denote gender and social status in Chaucer's literature, e.g., "knyght," "lady," "leche," "wyf '," focusing on MerT, FranT, ABC, and TC, but addressing most of Chaucer's works.

Burger characterizes second-wave feminism as a precursor of gay and lesbian studies, arguing that queer theory desires and explores the past in particularized rather than universalized ways, in part to "trouble Foucault's epistemic break between the…

Describes distinctions that derive from transgender politics and explores how the gender and sexual identities in SumPT--"largely constructed by and through its twin genres of antifraternal critique and fabliau"--"insinuate that friars are both…

Romance is the medieval genre that most clearly dramatizes gendered identity, focusing on "courtship, marriage, lineal concerns, primogeniture, and sexual maturation." Chaucer's KnT, WBT, SqT, FranT, and Th reflect and confront masculine identity…

Despite its antifeminist core, medieval exegesis is not "universally misogynistic or patriarchal." Focusing on three historical moments--the age of Augustine, the twelfth century, and the age of Chaucer, including his fifteenth-century…

Bokenham "strategically utilizes feminine piety" and his own "dullness" to express political dissent in a style that differs from the high rhetorical style of Gower, Chaucer, and Lydgate. He rejects their "classicizing, aureate" tradition, initiating…

A study of "the interconnectedness of gender, epistemology, and poetics in Chaucer's texts," focusing on "idioms of gender that attend narrative protocols of reflexitivity and appropriation." Examines the linguistic, discursive, and sexual…

Lampert decenters Christianity and releases the study of Jews and Judaism from a "restricted economy of particularism." She shows how representations of Jews go beyond representations of the "Other" in a range of English texts by revealing…

Describes the use of select Chaucerian works as part of a four- or five-week unit in an undergraduate introduction to literature.

Chaucer explores the limits of romance and extends them so that TC, KnT, SqT, Th, WBT, and FranT become "poems about narrative."

Part of Paravicini's three-volume study of the crusades against Lithuania undertaken by the Teutonic order, focusing on literary backgrounds to the chivalric imagination underlying the crusades. Includes evidence of tensions between crusading and…