Rowland, Beryl.
University of Toronto Quarterly 35 (1966): 246-59.
Comments on the prevalence of horse-and-rider imagery in Western culture, and explores Chaucer's uses of the imagery in BD (the hunt), TC (Bayard and Troilus's ride-bys), Wife of Bath (spurs, bridles, and other sexualized images), and various other…
Scheps, Walter.
Tennessee Studies in Literature 11 (1966): 35-43.
Describes and paraphrases Thop, focusing on its style, vocabulary, genre, and adaptation of conventions to show that a tension between "the heroic and the bourgeois" underpins much of the bathos of the Tale and its parodic impact.
Treats the narrator-dreamer of BD as the poem's "central character" and a device of unity and dramatic irony. The character does not "develop" psychologically, but his polite good nature--comically limited by his ignorance of courtly idiom--enables…
Stewart, Donald C.
CEA Critic 29.3 (1966): 1, 4-6.
Suggests that interpretations of the Pardoner are overwrought, arguing that he acts "perfectly in the character given him by his creator" and that his somewhat troubling offer of relics to the Host is best understood as a joke.
A series of literary portraits, each combining biography and appreciative criticism. The section on Chaucer, entitled "Founder of English Literature" (pp. 17-31), emphasizes his careers in business and diplomacy, his poetic "borrowings," and his…
Wentersdorf, Karl P.
Studies in Philology 63 (1966): 604-29.
Anatomizes motifs in the sources and analogues of the pear tree episode in MerT, focusing on several modern Irish analogues that have details of characterization which parallel those in MerT and have an intervention by male and female fairies.…
Winny, James, ed.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966.
Presents ClPT in Middle English (based on Robinson's 1957 edition), with notes and glossary at the end of the text, along with an appendix (pp. 91-99) that offers lines 4.813-924 of ClT in facing-page juxtaposition with one of its source texts, "Le…
Adduces details from the Old French "Floire et Blancheflor, Version 1" as evidence that Chaucer's "catalogue of magical accomplishments" in FranT 5.1139-51 was commonplace, i.e., part of a well-known tradition, deployed by the Franklin to outdo the…
Considers medieval knowledge of tidal patterns and details about astrology and the seasons in FranT to support the argument that the clerk of Orleans predicts rather than magically causes the rise of the sea, disguising the presence of the coastal…
Argues that the Summoner "triumphs over" the Friar in their tale-telling competition, revealing his greater intelligence and competence, but also indicating that his social success discloses a more fundamental "malignancy and egotism." Compares the…
Zimbardo, Rose A.
Tennessee Studies in Literature 11 (1966): 11-18.
Reads WBPT as concerned with the "reconciliation of opposites that to human perception seem irreconcilable." WBP poses a range of oppositions dialectically (experience and authority, female and male, physical and metaphysical), resolving them through…
Explores the meanings and implications of the phrase "spiced conscience" in Middle English and later English language history, arguing that in both the GP description of the Parson (1.526) and the Wife of Bath's admonition to her husband (WBP 3.435)…
Blanch, Robert J.
Lock Haven Review 8 (1966): 8-15.
Demonstrates the presence of three kinds of irony in MerT: verbal irony in the Merchant's double entendres and introductory comments on marriage, rhetorical irony in the deflation of courtly ideals by means of distorted or exaggerated figures and…
Assesses Chaucer's "vulgarisms" for the ways that they "reveal" his "expert insight into the uninhibited lives of the folk." Comments on Chaucer's depictions of incest, claims that Chaucer's uses 119 "bawdy terms," and focuses on his robust…
Anthologizes selections and excerpts from medieval literature and history (most in modern English), offered for use as a textbook in social history. Includes GP, lines 1-274 (pp. 228-48), in normalized Middle English, with no notes or glosses,…
Brooks, Polly Schoyer, and Nancy Zinsser Walworth.
Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1966.
Social history of western medieval Europe from the "Barbarian Invasions" to "The Last of the Middle Ages," presented for young adults. The final section of the book (pp. 221-46) focuses on Chaucer, imaginatively reconstructing his daily life and…
Brown, W[illia]m J.
University of Colorado Studies. Series in Language and Literature 10 (1966): 15-22.
Argues that the dramatic interchange between the Miller and the Reeve in MilP "anticipates every important argument in Chaucer's formal defense" of including the ribald MilT in CT. Together the two "apologies" constitute a "richly comic but…
Compares ShT with Boccaccio's "Decameron" 8.1 and 8.2 in order to "see the two writers more minutely for what they are," arguing for Chaucer's "clear, almost measurable superiority" in matters of atmosphere, vitality, characterization, and moral…
Dean, Christopher.
Notes and Queries 211 (1966): 90-92.
Assesses the five uses of "place" as a locational noun in the description of the tournament in KnT, arguing that it has a "precise technical meaning," i.e., the "grassy ground of the arena within the lists." This meaning is also found in Middle…
Describes a "flicker of humour" in Chaucer's allusion to Boethius in NPT (7.3294-95), indicating that the poet disagrees with his authority on the point of musical sensitivity.
Elliott, Ralph W. V.
Review of English Literature 7.2 (1966): 63-71.
Questions some of critics' claims about the Pardoner (particularly rejecting the claim that he is drunk), and argues that the Pardoner's character and his performance cohere and exhibit his "craft and talent" as well as his efforts "to entertain and…
Fleming, John V.
Journal of English and Germanic Philology 65 (1966): 688-700.
Challenges arguments that seek to identify the friar of SumT with a specific fraternal order and adduces the Rules of various fraternal orders and commentaries on these Rules to show that "general antifraternal literature" underlies many details of…
Fletcher, Harris.
Notes and Queries 211 (1966): 254.
Identifies a reference to the Wife of Bath's equation of friars and incubi (WBT 3.865-80) in Richard Crakanthorp(e)'s "Introductio in Metaphysicam" (1619).
