Mapstone, Sally.
Jocelyn Wogan-Browne et al., eds. Medieval Women: Texts and Contexts in Late Medieval Britain: Essays for Felicity Riddy (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2000), pp. 131-47.
Although the love affair between Criseyde and Troilus is a medieval invention, Criseyde had a significant literary ancestry. In Latin versions of the Iliad, in Ovid's Heroides and Ars amatoria, and in the later romance tradition,…
Marchand, James W.
Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 100: 43-49, 1999.
Chaucer's punning use of "quoniam" in WBP was not the first time this word was used as a sexual euphemism. Giraldus Cambriensis, Matheolus, Juan Ruiz, and the author of the "Roman de Flamenca" used this euphemism in their writings.
Marchand, Yvette Marie.
Piero Boitani and Anna Torti, eds. The Body and the Soul in Medieval Literature (Woodbridge, Suffolk; Rochester, N.Y.: D. S. Brewer, 1999), pp. 123-44.
Traces the development of body-soul relations in Western intellectual tradition as they are reflected in LGW, in book 1 of Edmund Spenser's "Faerie Queene," and in Richard Burton's "Anatomy of Melancholy." Uses St. Augustine as a point of departure…
Argues that Criseyde is a "willful agent," who reveals "nominalist intentions" and is guided by her own desires and "misdirected will" in her love of Troilus.
Marenbon, John.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015.
Examines the influence of paganism on Christian writers from the fifth century to the eighteenth century. Includes a chapter on entitled "Langland and Chaucer: The Continuity of the Problem of Paganism" (pp. 214–34).
Maresca, Thomas E.
Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979.
Chaucer explicitly identifies TC as an epic. Like most epics,it uses the structural and thematic device of the "descensus." It also contains many reminders of and allusions to other epics, but also frees him from the confines of Christian allegory…
Margherita Gayle.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994.
Six essays that treat literature as "another kind of history" by "problematizing the question of history both within and around medieval literature." Challenging historicist approaches, the essasy are deconstructive, psychoanalytic, and feminist,…
Margherita, Gayle Margaret.
Dissertation Abstracts International 51 (1991): 4115A.
Applies Freudian and feminist theory to three extracanonical medieval texts, presenting them as the "unconscious" of works in the literary canon. Also analyzes BD and TC.
Margherita, Gayle.
Linda Lomperis and Sarah Stanbury, eds. Feminist Approaches to the Body in Medieval Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), pp. 116-41.
Reprinted in Gayle Margherita, The Romance of Origins Language and Sexual Difference in Middle English Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), pp. 82-99.
Reprinted in Gayle Margherita. The Romance of Origins: Language and Sexual Difference in Middle English Literature (Philadelaphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), pp. 100-28.
Considers how "history becomes the unconscious of romance" in TC. Criseyde is pronounced dead at the opening of the work (1.56) but does not die in the story; as a "symptom of the poem's disavowal of history and materiality, she also marks its…
Explores medieval English marital laws and practices that underlie details of the WBP and her description in GP, particularly her marriages at "chirche dore," her dowers, and the transaction that gave Jankyn control of her lands--before she took it…
Marino, John B.
Essays in Medieval Studies 13: 121-29, 1996.
Explores the imagery of oxen, stalls, and yoking in Boethian and Christian traditions, arguing that they underlie Chaucer's allegorical uses of the imagery in Truth, ClT, NPT, and the CT at large.
Marken, Ronald.
Discourse: A Review of the Liberal Arts 7 (1964): 381-87.
Treats Henryson's "Testament of Cresseid" as a sequel to TC, examining how its attitude and tone differ from Chaucer's work, largely as a result of differing styles, techniques, opinions, and points of view. Henryson's style and tone are harsher, and…
Markland, Murray F
Research Studies: A Quarterly Publication of Washington State University 33 (1965): 1-10.
Compares how and to what extent Theseus in KnT and Prospero in Shakespeare's "The Tempest" are responsible for the initial disorder and the final order of their respective stories. Theseus progresses from aggressive engagement in the world to…
Markland, Murray F.
Research Studies: A Quarterly Publication of Washington State University 33 (1965): 64-77.
Explores how each of the three major characters in TC seeks "happiness in earthly love." Even though they know that such pursuit is misguided, they are in "an unadmitted conspiracy not to recognize" their error, deceiving themselves and each other,…
Markland, Murray F.
Modern Language Quarterly 31 (1970): 147-59.
Examines the "shifts in point of view, authorial intrusion, changes in subject, and multiple closures" of the final seventeen stanzas of TC, reading their structure closely, and arguing that they produce an "artistic disorder, the purpose of which is…
Comments on Chaucer criticism produced between 1950 and 1964 and, treating Chaucer's work as a "single fiction," reads it as a "complex examination of what it means to love" in earthly and spiritual ways. An "abyss exists between" the two kinds of…
Markot, Margaret Lindsey.
Dissertation Abstracts International 48 (1988): 1777A.
Treatments of Dido and Aeneas in HF and LGW indicate that Chaucer develops a narrator-character who mediates actively between subject and audience in a more modern way than do his sources.
Psychological analysis of six of the Canterbury pilgrims (Knight, Man of Law, Narrator [in Mel], Pardoner, Clerk, and Second Nun, followed by "six recreations" in prose that attempt to project the characters as modern storytellers.
Markus, Manfred.
Claus Uhlig and Rudiger Zimmerman, eds. Anglistentag 1990 Marburg: Proceedings of the Conference of the German Association of University Professors of English, no. 12 (Tubingen: Niemeyer, 1991), pp. 177-94.
Enumerative disjunctions, emphasizers, repetition, and variation produce the controlled style of CT. Chaucer's two prose tales, ParsT and Mel, have characteristics that are found less in verse (and that modern readers dislike): cohesive redundancy…
Markus, Manfred.
Dieter Kastovsky and Arthur Mettinger, eds. Language Contact in the History of English (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 2001), pp. 217-31.
Markus examines several features of Chaucer's spelling--digraphs, vowel doubling, "ee" versus "e"--drawing data from ParsT and arguing that inconsistencies in vowel-doubling are related to vowel length's "having lost its former phonemic identity."…
Markus, Manfred.
Uwe Boker et al., eds. Of Remembraunce the Keye: Medieval Literature and Its Impact Through the Ages. Festschrift for Karl Heinz Goller on the Occasion of His 80th Birthday (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 2004), pp. 95-108.
Explores the often-submerged relations between Middle English romances and the Crusades, reading Th as Chaucer's rejection of the "pleasure of indoctrination directed against the pagan enemy." Considers Th "modern, partly even postmodern," in its…
