Browse Items (16470 total)

Contrasts the printing history of Gower's "Confessio Amantis" with that of CT, describing how Berthelette's 1532 printing the "Confessio"--the only edition between Caxton and the nineteenth century--contributed to the critical privileging of Chaucer…

Examines the textual tradition of Bo in light of the twelfth- to fifteenth-century textual tradition of Boethius's "Consolation of Philosophy," suggesting that the best text of Bo is Cambridge University Library ii.iii.21.

Examines the differing ways Hoccleve, Lydgate, and Henryson responded to and imitated Chaucer, observing their sensitivity to his metatextual concerns and his sense of literary history. These three authors do not comprise a single and unified…

Questions why Shakespeare--rather than Chaucer or others--is the "favorite son" of Anglo-American textual theory, arguing that the "unilinear transmission" of Shakespeare's plays makes it easier to pursue the illusion of authorial intent. Based on…

Challenging suggestions that individuals like Chaucer are agents of linguistic change, Machan argues that they cannot foresee history and therefore cannot work to a future end. The article surveys political factors in late-medieval English linguistic…

Machan studies the "social meanings, functions, and status of the English language in the late-medieval period," i.e., its "sociolinguistic contextualization." He explores Henry III's letters of 1258; the relationships between language, dialects, and…

The "textual-critical ferment" of the 1980s prompted two "editorial ideas" that have largely (and sadly) been ignored by Chaucer editors and teachers: Derek Pearsall's suggestion that an edition of CT should allow the fragments to be arranged…

Critiques traditional treatment of Chaucer's English as the main antecedent of modern English and the assertion that it is representative. Chaucer's English is more conservative than that of many of his contemporaries and of general spoken discourse.…

Traces the definition and history of "knarre' in GP, cataloguing evidence for both a Dutch and Old Norse etymology. Offers some considerations for the role of the lexicographer and historian in general by addressing the particular history and meaning…

Describes various ways that scribes used "visual pragmatics" (i.e., "bibliographic codes like rubrication, illumination, underscoring and so forth") to indicate code-switching in late medieval English literary manuscripts. Includes a comment on the…

Suggests that authors including Chaucer, Langland, Hoccleve, and Johannes de Caritate employed Aristotelian and pseudo-Aristotelian sources (many derived from Arabic sources) in the course of exploring types of literary and cultural authority.

Maciulewicz examines Neoclassical rewritings of medieval texts, focusing on Dryden's and Pope's reworking of Chaucer (CT and HF). Close readings show that eighteenth-century revisions seek to elevate Chaucer to promote national literature and,…

The chapter entitled "Who's the Head of the Family?" includes the modern translation of WBPT by A. Kent Hieatt and Constance Hieatt, somewhat abridged.

Pope's copy of Chaucer, with his own youthful annotations, still survives. And though his marking of the text shows careful perusal of it (especially Rom), these early annotations are ultimately not very revealing of Pope's maturer feelings about…

Argues "that poets after Chaucer employ the dream form not simply in imitation of their master but rather to assert for themselves the same freedom to write imaginative fictions that Chaucer found in the form," exploring Chaucer's dream visions,…

Textbook edition of NPPT. Includes glosses and discursive notes (at the back of the book) and discussion of approaches to the text: sources and analogues, characterization, assessment of theme and topic, and analysis of poetic technique. Also…

Textbook edition of the Miller's sketch from GP, MilPT, and RvP, including glosses and discursive notes, and a discussion of "approaches" to the works--sources and analogues, character analysis, assessment of theme and topic, and analysis of poetic…

Textbook edition of GP. Includes glosses and discursive notes (at the back of the book) and discussion of approaches to the text: sources and analogues, characterization, assessment of theme and topic, and analysis of poetic technique. Also includes…

Mack examines public and private oratory in Book 4 of TC, exploring the emotional emphases that Chaucer adds to Boccaccio and focusing on the relationship between emotion and argument in rhetorical theory. Mack's essay tallies Chaucer's various ways…

Explores questions of audience, occasion, and a writer's control in classical and early modern western rhetoric, and applies these questions in a "sample reading," examining TC, 3.1324–36 for the ways that it encourages readers "to re-experience…

Explores the "creative power of literary tradition" in medieval and contemporary works. Includes a chapter on TC and Boccaccio's "Il filostrato."

Includes selections from GP (pp. 16-33) in Middle English with Nevill Coghill's modern translation on facing pages and brief comments and notes (pp. 296-97).

Argues that TC, in its "integration of style, structure, and theme with meaning," is best regarded as "transitionally Renaissance in its entire import." Articulates differences between medieval and Renaissance cultures, and argues that TC better…

Identifies allusions to Chaucer from the "Periamma Epidemion" of 1659: to the description of the Physician in GP 1.437-38 and to WBP 3.227-28

Commends the force and clarity of the passage on old age in RvP (1.3887-98), particularly the images of the wine cask and the tongue, the first familiar to Chaucer as a member of a family in the wine business