Browse Items (16471 total)

Examines fictional representations of Troy as England's mythic ancestor in TC, HF, Gower's Vox Clamantis, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and other works. Since Troy was thought to have led to later empires only through its fall, the city is an…

Comments on differences and similarities among these characters: the Wife of Bath as depicted in WBP, La Vieille of "Roman de la Rose," and old women who take young lovers in two medieval Japanese narratives.

Argues that the old man of PardT is neither a Messenger of Death nor Old Age personified, but a figure of the exemplary wisdom and virtue of the aged, set in contrast the youthful rioters and their foolish avarice. Compares Chaucer's "aged stranger"…

Argues that the Reeve's sword is rusty (GP 1.618) "because the Reeve is past the age for using it." Suggests that he wears it as a symbol of his desire for youth and comments on Chaucer's multiple uses of signifying details.

Explores the representation of old age in WBPT, MerT, PardT, Piers Plowman, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Confessio Amantis, and the Book of Margery Kempe, arguing that the motif of old age falls into three distinct categories: "the comical figure…

Explains the different strands in Scog partly through elements taken from Cicero's De amicitia and partly through its nature as a begging poem for Michaelmas, when annuities were renewed.

Lists Chaucer items on language studies throughout.

Illustrated survey of Old and Middle English literature, with recurrent attention to linguistic conditions and the development of literary genres and conventions. Includes many comparative references to Chaucer in the discussion of Middle English…

A pedagogical anthology designed for use in classes on the History of the English Language. The materials that pertain to Chaucer (pp. 81-115) include Bo 2m5 ("The Former Age"), a guide to pronunciation, lines 1-42 of GP, and PardPT.

Edits GP and WBPT from the Ellesmere manuscript, with glosses, notes, and brief introductions. The first edition of the volume (2000) includes no works by Chaucer; the third (2010) includes no additional material by him.

Examines "The Kingis Quair" and "The Testament of Cresseid," the 'two Scottish works that respond most fully' to Chaucer's corpus, demonstrating how these poems rework Chaucerian verse and its framings for new and possibly subversive ends. Compares…

Literature is both source and subject matter for Chaucer. In BD, PF, and HF, he transforms source material ("old books") into "new" Chaucerian texts with their own structures and themes.

Covers the first nine hundred years of English poetry. Includes treatments of Chaucer, his circle of friends, his choice of English as a literary language, his foreign influence.

Explicating WBP 418, Rex rejects Skeats's interpretation ("the common food of rustics") and Hoffman's ("harmony in marriage") and decides, on the basis of Old and Middle French slang meanings attested to in riddles and fabliaux, that the obscene…

Explores cultural, stylistic, and personal aspects of translating CT into Portuguese verse, focused on making the work "readable . . . to the Brazilian readership" in detail and idiom, but also a "bit old-fashioned" and "familiar in a strange way."

Explicates details in the GP description of the Cook, CkPT, and ManP, exploring their physical and moral implications for characterization, "food safety" in Chaucer's London, and hygiene among its victuallers--cooks, innkeepers, and manciples.

Comments briefly on Cecilia of SNT as background to an allusion to her in "Eve of St. Mark" and on the "quaintly Chaucerian lines" in Keats's poem.

In drafting learned sources (Ovid, Boethius, Dante) onto the core of a popular story, WBT generates a form of romance with appeal for "serious" readers; the appeal of this genre rests not on marvels and adventure but on individual fulfillment through…

Reeves traces the evolution of old wives' tales (including WBT) and assesses how such tales represent fancy and superstition in early scientific theories of the Copernican system. However, the tales also promote the theory of extraterrestrial life,…

Traces the tradition of characterizing stories as "old wives' tales" from Plato through Apuleius and Jerome to Chaucer's WBT, showing how the genre draws power from the paradox that "old women were the least powerful members of society and yet the…

Surveys the tradition of English "old word" and "hard word" dictionary- and glossary-making, locating Chaucerian compilations (e.g., Greaves, Speght, Urry, etc.) at the beginning of the tradition and tracing developments in practice into the…

Statistical exploration of words attributed to Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton. In the fourth edition of Bailey's dictionary (1728), the classifications "Chaucerian" and "old" are not distinct.

Recovers clues to Chaucer's own authorial recital by searching for evidence of tonal intentions in TC. Provides a performance-based reading of the poem that begins with "the premise that Chaucer himself once recited TC aloud," thus allowing "evidence…

Witalisz explores ambivalent attitudes toward war in Middle English romances, particularly those concerned with Troy or King Arthur. Chaucer's attitude is "only implicit," and the anti-war stance attributed to him is based on "his deliberate silence…

Dane argues on the basis of two copies of Thynne's edition that one cannot properly speak of them as "corrected" or "uncorrected."