Meale, Carol M., ed.
Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1994.
Twelve essays, by various authors, from the Third Conference on Romance in England, held March-April 1992 at the University of Bristol. Topics include generic definition; textual transmission; audience reception; romance and emergent nationalism;…
Includes discussion of the influence of KnT on Shakespeare's play, focusing on the play's structure and its concern with "reconciling a faith in cosmic order with our experience of life's apparent chaos" (256).
Medcalf, Stephen, ed.
New York: Holmes and Meier, 1981.
Essays include "On Reading Books from a Half-Alien Culture," "The Ideal, the Real, and the Quest for Perfection," "Inner and Outer," "Art and Architecture in the Late Middle Ages," "The Age of the Household: Politics, Society, and the Arts c.…
Medcalf, Stephen.
Stephen Medcalf, ed. The Later Middle Ages (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1981), pp. 291-303.
The word "uncircumscript" near the end of TC suggests Chaucer's Boethianism. Chaucer's TC differs from Boccaccio's "Filostrato" in telling the story of a man who lives by "love's heigh service" in a universe where love holds the world together.
Medcalf, Stephen.
Nicholas Rogers, ed. England in the Fourteenth Century: Proceedings of the 1991 Harlaxton Symposium (Stamford, Conn.: Paul Watkins, 1993), pp. 97-108.
Explores the motives for pilgrimage implied in Beryn and CT, comparing them with the urge to "darshan" ("seek the deity") in Hindu tradition. The motives of the fictional pilgrims are more genuinely spiritual than has been argued by some critics.
Medcalf, Stephen.
A. J. Minnis, Charlotte C. Morse, and Thorlac Turville-Petre, eds. Essays on Ricardian Literature: In Honour of J. A. Burrow (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), pp. 222-51.
Summarizes Usk's life and career. While assessing the fusion of various levels of meaning in "The Testament of Love," Medcalf observes what Usk borrows from Chaucer (HF and TC) and Langland, as well as from Boethius and Anselm.
Medcalf, Stephen.
David Daiches and Anthony Thorlby, eds. Medieval World. Literature and Western Civilization, [no. 2] (London: Aldus, 1973), pp. 643-96.
Describes the emergence of "something very like a Ricardian literary movement," focusing on the ability of Langland, Chaucer, and the "Pearl" poet to accept the mundane world completely and yet remain detached from it. Connects this ability with the…
Medcalf, Stephen.
Stephen Medcalf, ed. The Later Middle Ages (London: Methuen; New York: Holmes & Meier, 1981), pp. 1-55.
Seeks to bridge the intellectual and emotion distance between modern readers and medieval literature, addressing the nature of semantic change and changing ideas about human personality. Includes commentary on a range of medieval works, with extended…
Medcalf, Stephen.
Roger Ellis, ed. The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English. Volume I: To 1550 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 364-90.
Surveys the tradition of medieval translation from Latin into English, commenting on Continental mediators and awareness of Greek literature. Focuses on translations of Boethius (including Chaucer's) and those of Apollonius of Tyre, treating them as…
Medeiros, Márcia Maria de.
Suellen Cordovil de Silva, and Tiago Marques Luiz, eds. O Humor nas Literaturas de Expressão de Línqua Inglesa (São Paulo: Paco Editorial, 2018), pp. 13-38.
Revised version of "Humor e Ironia em Geoffrey Chaucer: O Conto do Molerio X O Conto do Feitor" (2013)
Medeiros, Vladimir José, and Márcia Maria Medeiros.
Akropolis-Unipar: Journal of Human Sciences 21.2 (2013): 69-77.
Assesses humor and irony in MilT and RvT, with attention to satire and Bakhtinian concerns of social class. In Portuguese, with an abstract in English. Revised by Márcia Maria de Medeiros as "Figurações do Humor em Geoffrey Chaucer--Uma Leitura de…
Tabulates and assesses the uses of singular "ye" and "thou" in CT, considering usage norms, rhyme patterns, and scribal variants, and identifying patterns of high incidence of "incorrect" usage in CYPT, KnT, WBP, and Mel, while ParsT is also highly…
Medieval Murderers, The. [Bernard, Knight, Ian Morson, Michael Jecks, Philip Gooden, and Susanna Gregory.]
London: Simon & Schuster, 2007.
Historical fiction in a series of five "interlinked mysteries" that pertain to Bermondsey Priory and its curse. The section titled "Act Four," by Philip Gooden, "relates to how the poet Chaucer becomes embroiled in the priory's dark history."
Meech, Sanford B.
[Syracuse, N.Y.]: Syracuse University Press, 1959.
A close reading of the structure, themes, and rich characterizations of TC, examined in comparison with its primary source, Boccaccio's "Filostrato," and with sustained attention to ancillary sources and Chaucer's particular emphases, especially the…
Meecham-Jones, Simon.
Neil Thomas and Francoise Le Saux, eds. Unity and Difference in European Cultures. Durham Modern Language Series (Durham: University of Durham, 1998), pp. 155-71.
HF is a response to the "creative anxiety inherent in seeking to continue a literary inheritance believed to have already reached its highest peaks of achievement." In his presentation of a desert landscape, Chaucer partially resists Continental…
Meecham-Jones, Simon.
Corinne Saunders, Francoise Le Saux, and Neil Thomas, eds. Writing War: Medieval Literary Responses to Warfare (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2004), pp. 147-67.
In TC, Chaucer avoids focusing on war, revealing his awareness of its importance in perpetrating the aristocratic culture of his day, as well as his need to evade the expectations imposed on him as a writer. Conflict and the psychological disjunction…
Meecham-Jones, Simon.
Carolyn P. Collette, ed. The Legend of Good Women: Context and Reception (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2006), pp. 132-56.
In LGW, Chaucer sets classical action in the context of Christian notions of moral intention; he poses a range of subtly differentiated portraits of difficulty in recording truth in human terms and human time. Knowability, the narrator's presence,…
Meecham-Jones, Simon.
Neil Thomas and Françoise Le Saux, eds. Myth and Its Legacy in European Literature. Durham Modern Languages Series (Durham: University of Durham), 1996, pp. 93-113.
Meecham-Jones contrasts LGWP with BD, showing how the former exhibits the poet's confidence in adapting sources. Discusses the depiction of Alceste as a parody of figures such as Boethius's Philosophy, Dante's Beatrice, and the Pearl-maiden -…
Chaucer's sensitivity to the "cultural survival" of Wales is suggested in three moments in HF: the insinuation that Wales is near the river of forgetfulness through a visual pun on "Cymerie" (73); the citation of an unknown and hence implicitly…
Meecham-Jones, Simon.
Stephanie Downes, Andrew Lynch, and Katrina O'Loughlin, eds. Emotions and War: Medieval to Romantic Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), pp. 77–97.
Considers the concept of "manhod" (3.428) in TC in relation to critical discussions of Troilus's masculinity, reading Troilus's emotions in light of late medieval literary and social conventions and arguing that Chaucer's experiment in emotion is…
Questions whether BD circulated in the fourteenth century and whether it was commissioned by John of Gaunt as an elegy for his wife. The mid-fifteenth-century manuscript Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Fairfax 16 bears the arms of a court functionary,…
