Reads Th and its narrator's dialogue with the Host as Chaucer's commentary on gender, vernacularity, and the public role of the poet in his contemporary world.
Surveys Chaucer's attention to the theological issue of bodily resurrection in FrT, SumT, and PardT, set against a survey of orthodox and heterodox positions in the Church Fathers and Dante. Then establishes Chaucer's "conservative" attitude toward…
Stock, Lorraine, and Betty J. Proctor.
Medieval Perspectives 25 (2010): 103-23.
Demonstrates Daniel Defoe's familiarity with CT, and documents the fundamental influence of Chaucer's Wife of Bath on the form and content of "Moll Flanders."
Gives examples of the traditional humor that derives from exaggeration in depictions of giants in Middle English romance, and argues that, in Th, Chaucer goes "one step further" in making Oliphaunt ridiculous, largely because this giant is seen from…
Tallies a number of "significant" allusions to the Vulgate Bible in CT and offers pedagogical advice on how to remedy the problem of modern students missing these allusions or misreading them.
Argues that Chaucer (like Michel Foucault) understands power to be, at times, in the control of the "traditionally powerless" (e.g., servants and women), largely because they have subversive knowledge of their subjugators' private behavior. In ClT,…
Rack, Melissa J.
Medieval Perspectives 25 (2010): 89-102.
Argues that, in KnT, Chaucer does not resolve the disjunction between Aristotelian natural philosophy and Christian theology that is found in medieval university discourse; instead, he amplifies the tension to allow the "freeplay of interpretation." …
Jost, Jean E.
Medieval Perspectives 28 (2013): 145-82,
Though medieval orthodoxy insisted on the reality of free will, TC presents three characters subject to fortune at every turn, perhaps because they are pre-Christian pagans. Troilus is a victim of fortune from the moment he sees Criseyde. Pandarus…
The Parson is exceptional among the Canterbury Pilgrims for his corporeal invisibility; his GP portrait gives no corporeal details and ParsPT efface his body, along with fiction, verse, and the colors of rhetoric. Moreover, ParsT displays hostility…
Considers Thomas Aquinas's "Summa theologica" as a source of the concern with demons' bodies in FrT, arguing that Chaucer followed Thomas's account of this question with intelligent and close attention.
Carroll, Virginia Schaefer.
Medieval Perspectives 3 (1988): 76-88.
MilT and RvT raise the issue of "maistrie" in relation to the economic stability of the family. Women are defined as passive, in terms that equate sexual loyalty and commercial value. Wives "quyte" (repay) their husbands through financial loss and…
Fisher, John H.
Medieval Perspectives 4-5 (1989-90): 1-24.
CT exhibits tension between the corporate nature of medieval society and the domestic impulses of an "inner-directed society," in which the emergence of the poet is an important aspect of assertion of the self. In GP, the narrator signals irony. …
Analyzes Chaucer's self-consciousness as a writer though the narrator in the prologue, the proems, and the ending of TC. Not the result of naivete, the contradictions, emotional involvement, and irony suggest that the narrator's design is to whet the…
Pickering, James D.
Medieval Perspectives 4-5 (1989-90): 140-49.
The final three fragments of CT are united in a purposeful pattern by reference to Jeremiah 6. Allusion to testing and failure suggests the alchemical metaphor, enabling correlations between the particulars of specific pilgrims and the generality of…
Vitto, Cindy L.
Medieval Perspectives 4-5 (1989-90): 217-27.
Allusions to Christian heaven and hell suggest the inadequacy of the love of Troilus and Criseyde. Troilus's end, contrary to his Boethian source, indicates that he has no free will. It is unlikely that he achieves either Christian or pagan…
Hagen, Susan K.
Medieval Perspectives 4-5 (1989-90): 42-52.
Recent feminist study of the early Christian movement reveals that women enjoyed a high degree of authority and autonomy. Read against this background, SNT exhibits the changed status of women by the late fourteenth century.
Bowers, John M.
Medieval Perspectives 6 (1991): 135-43.
Thomas Chaucer continued the lease on his father's house in the garden at Westminster Abbey to provide a repository for Geoffrey Chaucer's literary remains. His motive was to help form a Lancastrian poetic canon committed to social stability and…
Felch, Susan M.
Medieval Perspectives 6 (1991): 144-53.
The realist-nominalist debate underlies Chaucer's language, which, through multiple discourses and by analogy, embodies social order. By withholding his authority, Chaucer delegates responsibility for moral decisions to his readers.
Bott, Robin L.
Medieval Perspectives 6 (1991): 154-61.
When describing her fourth husband, the Wife is silent on topics freely discussed with respect to her other husbands (particularly money, age, and temperment); this suggests the equality of the two in these areas. Their marriage fails because the…
Fragments VIII and IX are connected by opposed images of sight and blindness, idleness and work. Themes of alchemical transformation and restraints on freedom (food, mates, language) also link the fragments.
As a figure of the writer, Pandarus embodies the perverse nature of artist as observer. Having completed his narrative in the consummation scene, Pandarus must invent another tale to make "wommen unto men to comen" and to survive as an author.
Bisson, Lillian M.
Medieval Perspectives 7 (1992): 19-33.
Chaucer's and Eco's works appear to be structured as "unicursal labyrinths" but are really based on "multicursal labyrinths" in which no center can be found. Chaucer's aesthetic demonstrates the open quality that Eco finds specific to contemporary…
Mel suggests that interpretative perspective is crucial to meaning. Like the rest of fallen nature, language is indeterminate, so prudence is required to make sense of contingent existence. Apparent contradictions in Mel disappear if we understand…
