Skeat wrote a "Canterbury tale" in Middle English that admonishes the sin of covetousness, is thoroughly grounded in the Middle Ages, and fits into the scheme of CT. It reveals one of the more "relaxed moments" of this great Chaucer scholar, about…
Johnson, James D.
English Language Notes 38: 41-49, 2001.
Leigh Hunt's "The Tapiser's Tale" amplifies our understanding of Hunt as a nineteenth-century Chaucerian. The poem both imitates Chaucer's language and verse and utilizes the setting, plot, and key motifs from Charles MacFarlane's account of…
Hilles, Carroll.
New Medieval Literatures 4: 189-212, 2001.
Bokenham "strategically utilizes feminine piety" and his own "dullness" to express political dissent in a style that differs from the high rhetorical style of Gower, Chaucer, and Lydgate. He rejects their "classicizing, aureate" tradition, initiating…
Hays, Peter.
English Language Notes 38: 57-64, 2001.
Chaucer's MerT may have influenced William Faulkner's "The Sound and the Fury." Each work presents the pear tree as a central symbol in a plot focused on greed and deception, one comic and the other tragic. Chaucer's and Faulkner's narratives also…
Couch, Julie Nelson.
Dissertation Abstracts International 61: 3554A, 2001.
Chaucer's representations of the child as pathetic and passive (in Th and PrT) contrasts with images of children in romance ("Havelock the Dane") and miracle tales ("Child Slain by Jews" and "The Jewish Boy"). Chaucer "canonizes" this negative view…
Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome.
Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 31: 113-46, 2001.
Echoing Chaucer's poetry while portraying non-Christian, racialized others, the Middle English romance "The Sultan of Babylon" invokes a "Saracen Chaucer" whose status as national poet depends on such markers of difference.
Bowden, Betsy.
Studies in Medievalism 11: 73-111, 2001.
The treatment of horses and horsemanship helps to contrast the "secular lightheartedness" of Thomas Stothard's 1809 painting of the Canterbury pilgrims and the "heartfelt religious fervor" William Blake sought to convey in his 1807 engraving.
Boffey, Julia, and A. S. G. Edwards.
Archiv für das Studium der Neueren Sprachen und Literaturen 238: 327-30, 2001.
A three-stanza poem in praise of the Virgin Mary--from a single leaf inserted after Lydgate's Life of Our Lady in Bodleian Library MS Bodley 120--alludes to or echoes SqT (5.347) and TC (5.1670).
Bianco, Sue.
Helen Cooney, ed. Nation, Court and Culture: New Essays on Fifteenth-Century English Poetry (Dublin and Portland, Ore.: Four Courts Press, 2001), pp. 95-115.
Critical reception of Lydgate has been prejudiced by negative comparisons with Chaucer. Fuller appreciation of Lydgate's poetry depends on recognizing that, while moral and political issues in Chaucer are largely exemplary, Lydgate writes to effect…
Heyworth, Gregory George.
Dissertation Abstracts International 61: 4375A, 2001.
Transmission of ancient Greek and Roman culture through Ovid to later tradition affected romance and shaped attitudes in popular literature. Heyworth discusses works by Marie de France, Chrétien de Troyes, Chaucer (with emphasis on politics in the…
Boffey, Julia.
Helen Cooney, ed. Nation, Court and Culture: New Essays on Fifteenth-Century English Poetry (Dublin and Portland, Ore.: Four Courts Press, 2001), pp. 116-28.
Contrasts the parliaments or courts of love in PF and LGWP with those in Lydgate's Temple of Glas and the anonymous Assembly of Ladies. The later poems present "idealizing fantasies of social assimilation or integration."
Tokunaga, Satoko.
The Library (ser. 7) 3: 223-35, 2001.
Argues that de Worde's text of MkT results from collation of Caxton's second edition with a manuscript probably of the Hengwrt group. There is no sign of editing beyond the evident desire to produce a complete text of MkT.
Stubbs, Estelle.
A. J. Minnis, ed. Middle English Poetry: Texts and Traditions. Essays in Honour of Derek Pearsall (Woodbridge, Suffolk; and Rochester, N.Y.: York Medieval Press, 2001), pp. 17-26.
Names written in manuscripts of CT indicate associations between these manuscripts and a number of Austin friars who were scribes; they also indicate that exemplars of some manuscripts were at Clare Priory. Friars may have copied the manuscripts…
Morse, Charlotte C.
A. J. Minnis, ed. Middle English Poetry: Texts and Traditions. Essays in Honour of Derek Pearsall (Woodbridge, Suffolk; and Rochester, N.Y.: York Medieval Press, 2001), pp.41-56.
Morse comments on how the Canterbury Tales Project may reinvigorate textual questions thought to have been answered by the Manly-Rickert edition and latent in the Variorum project. Explores such issues as tale order, tale revision, and manuscript…
Reviewing the traditional narrative of the Great Vowel Shift, with its recognition by Chaucer's early editors that major changes in prosody were underway, Giancarlo suggests revision of the monolithic GVS model in the direction of a more localized…
van Gelderen, Elly.
Jan Terje Faarlund, ed. Grammatical Relations in Change. Studies in Language Companion Series, no. 56 (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: Benjamins, 2001), pp. 137-57.
Cites examples from Chaucer and others to show the demise of the "(slight) person split" evident in earlier English impersonal constuctions.
Burnley, John David.
Dieter Kastovsky and Arthur Mettinger, eds. Language Contact in the History of English (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 2001), pp. 17-34.
Challenges "over-simple dichotomies" between English and French in late-medieval England and illustrates the "pragmatic complexity" of the use of Anglo-French texts. Assesses grammar, style, "speaker attitudes" (with reference to CT and TC), and…
Stockwell, Robert P, and Donka Minkova.
Dieter Kastovsky and Arthur Mettinger, eds. Language Contact in the History of English (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 2001), pp. 337-62.
Stockwell and Minkova argue that Chaucer's prosodic innovation is rooted in his familiarity with the "Romance decasyllabic model." The article focuses on duple and triple rhythmic units, suggesting that Chaucer imposed native iambic rhythm on romance…
Solopova, Elizabeth.
A. J. Minnis, ed. Middle English Poetry: Texts and Traditions. Essays in Honour of Derek Pearsall (Woodbridge, Suffolk; and Rochester, N.Y.: York Medieval Press, 2001), pp.27-40.
Compares punctuation in the Hengwrt and Ellesmere manuscripts with that of other manuscripts to argue that Chaucer's punctuation survives in the virgules of Hengwrt and Ellesmere, related to his development of the iambic pentameter line.
Gaylord, Alan T., ed.
New York and London : Routledge, 2001.
Prints fourteen pieces, ranging historically from Thomas Tyrwhitt and George Saintsbury to recent commentary, including new essays by Richard Osberg, Emerson Brown, and Winthrop Wetherbee. Includes an introduction that summarizes the contributions…
Cole, Andrew.
Dissertation Abstracts International 61: 2704A, 2001.
Although many assume that Chaucer and Langland felt compelled to revise their works to avoid anti-Wycliffite censorship, such censorship was restricted to clerical writing. Chaucer drew on Wycliffite translation techniques to improve his skill, as…
Burrow, J. A.
A. J. Minnis, ed. Middle English Poetry: Texts and Traditions. Essays in Honour of Derek Pearsall (Woodbridge, Suffolk; and Rochester, N.Y.: York Medieval Press, 2001), 169-79.
Compares authorial and scribal versions of passages from Hoccleve's verse, focusing on scribal omission of monosyllabic words, spelling variants, and terminal -e. Assesses what Hoccleve's practice might tell us about Gower's practice, and how the two…
Barney, Stephen A.
Kathleen M. Hewett-Smith, ed. William Langland's Piers Plowman: A Book of Essays (New York and London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 103-17.
Compares paired samples of Langland's and Chaucer's verse to argue that Langland's are superior in both sound and sense.
Wolfe, Jessica Lynn.
Dissertation Abstracts International 61: 3586A, 2001.
The Renaissance elicited mixed responses to machinery. Wolfe discusses reactions to Italian thought by Gabriel Harvey (including the effect on his reading of Chaucer), George Chapman, and Edmund Spenser.
