Browse Items (16470 total)

Praises E. Talbot Donaldson as a great textual scholar, using TC to explain Donaldson's ideas on rhyme and meter and discussing the final -"e" and the five-stress verse. The reliability of scribes is examined.

Although the format (alphabetical) of ABC limits it somewhat, it follows the style of fourteenth-century religious courtly lyrics with a heightened sense of emotionalism. The struggle of the Virgin with the devil in ABC can be equated with the…

Chaucer moves away from the Catholic concept of love, which abhors adultery. FranT is a happy tale in spite of the serious unanswered questions about God and life and love.

Chaucer derived his concepts of love poetry from various contemporary traditions of romantic love. He satirized the concepts of "fin amour" with a firm knowledge of its contrasting forms and unpredictable variety, utilizing all its aspects from its…

Reviews Augustinian criticism of R. P. Miller, B. F. Huppé, Lee W. Patterson, G. L. Kittridge, and D. W. Robertson. The Pardoner criticizes the church that licenses him for its follies and corruption. His performance is considered a "social gaffe,…

The double ending of TC reconciles issues about love raised in the story. Chaucer has made Troilus a lover in the tradition of courtly love but has also used Dante's "Paradiso" for his version of heaven. The pagan setting illuminates Christian…

Chaucer acknowledged his difficult role in using his "matere" --Boccaccio's "Filostrato"--and asked his reader to accept Criseyde kindly. Chaucer's transformation of the shallow Criseyde of Boccaccio into the complex woman of TC caused his "nervous…

Close reading of the uses of the conjunction "but" as an "illogical adversative" in Spenser's Proem to Book 6 of "The Faerie Queene," compared and contrasted with Chaucer's related uses in his GP. Generally, Chaucer's usage "serves narrative…

Explicates tensions within several poetic evocations of mutability in English poetry: the Old English "Wanderer," "Beowulf," the end of Chaucer's TC (5.1835-48), and Spenser's Mutability Cantos. Chaucer and Spenser both use "equivocation" to express…

Summarizes Chaucer's life and the plot and themes of CT; then gives "something of the flavor" of the CT by assessing the theological perspectives of pilgrims from differing social classes, treating KnT, WBP, PardPT, and NPT. Closes with a description…

Previous criticism often finds an unresolved tension between tale and teller in MLT and in the tale itself, leading a critic like Edward A. Block to declare the work "poor art." However, the admitted tensions within the tale between a feeling of…

"Pite" and its synonym "routhe" occur almost always in their original erotic context in Chaucer's earlier works: Pity, TC, PF, and FranT. It may be equated with "generous self-sacrifice" on the part of the lover. As Chaucer broadens the concept,…

Chaucer questions the nature of storytelling and the possibility of writing "truth" in imaginative literature. Two words express the divergence of the problem in the Middle Ages: "sooth," which is axiomatic truth (often expressed proverbially);…

The epithets "moral" and "kindly" have for centuries been applied, respectively, to Gower and Chaucer, with a deleterious effect upon critical evaluation of the two poets. The epithets can revealingly be reversed. Gower is seen as kindly in his…

Trevet's commentary on Seneca's "Hercules Furens," which Chaucer may have known, reveals that medieval theorists gave weight to the "formal cause" of tragedy. In TC, the interpolated songs, dreams, prayers, and letters may be analyzed as elements…

The pagan references in TC perform two obvious functions: they provide local color and they help to delineate character (as in Pandarus' scorn of Troilus--who has just uttered a prayer to several pagan deities--calling him a "mouses hert," III,…

Root's contention that his alpha, beta, and gamma classifications represent stages of Chaucer's revisions of TC is untenable. The ms evidence must be judged for itself,not in comparison with other "revision" problems such as those in Gower and…

Modernist critics reduce Troilus' experience to sentimentality. They encourage us to pity the hero because he could not do otherwise. The lesson of TC is, on the contrary, that the characters in the tale (and we the audience) do indeed have choices…

C. S. Lewis was right to emphasize Criseyde's timorousness. She is unambitious and moderate, and the cosy, unheroic situation in Troy in the first three books suits her well.

Two major sources of the realism in TC are the Platonic cosmic fables (e.g., the "Boece") and the arts of love or handbooks for lovers, particularly the "Pamphilus." The fables would seem far removed from realism; however, their writers' concern…

Recently critical emphasis has been upon the sustained irony in the tragic tale of TC. Along with it is a peculiarly Chaucerian kind of comedy that may best be labeled "bodily laughter," because although it laughs "at" the body, it does so out of…

This lesson plan focuses on Chaucer's CT. While initially requiring that students become familiar with Chaucer's rhetorical strategies, it also asks students to use these strategies to compose a "multimodal satire" of their own--one that focuses on…

Diachronic study of verbs like "become," "grow," "wax," and "turn" used as both linking and regular verbs. Old, Middle, Early Modern, and Modern English show a decline in dominant meaning, allowing for linking-verb use. Includes data from Chaucer.

Describes the interrelationship in HF between oral and written forms of transmission of literature. Only through the poet's journey through space (bk. 2) can limitations imposed by literary conventions of written text be overcome.

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…