Browse Items (16471 total)

Nineteen essays on a variety of subjects, medieval to postmodern, literary and linguistic. For two essays that pertain to Chaucer, search for And Gladly Wolde He Lerne and Gladly Teche (Goller) under Alternative Title.

Postcolonial analysis of post-Conquest attitudes toward France and French in England, considering the formulation of English identity. Williams discusses Chaucer, Corpus Christi plays, Stephen Hawes, John Skelton, Shakespeare, and continuing effects…

Strohm calls for renewed sensitivity to historical particularity in the study of literature, especially Chaucer. Such study must acknowledge the limits of modernist empiricist assumptions and maintain deep respect for the past and its mutually…

Argues that landscape is a device of characterization and narrative control in fourteenth-century literature, drawing examples from Chaucer's works.

A response to an essay by Glenn Burger ("Shameful Pleasures: Up Close and Dirty with Chaucer, Flesh, and the Word"), also in this volume.

Surveys modern and postmodern theorizing of rape and addresses rape in medieval England. Topics include secular, legal notions of rape; rape in canon law, theology, and confessional manuals (especially vernacular ones); rape motifs in hagiography…

A study of the representation of animals in late-medieval literature, focusing on how human identity is defined in relation to animals. Using examples from late-medieval hagiography and romance, Salter argues that medieval writers reflect on their…

Explores the role of virginity in notions of late-medieval bodies, genders, identities and social practices. The study, focusing on female religious versions of virginity, is structured around decreasing degrees of enclosure, examining hagiographic…

A discursive handbook to Chaucer's life and its context, his works, and criticism of his works. The biographical portion provides basic information and notes the variety of Chaucers constructed over the years. Rudd discusses the works chronologically…

Rose surveys instances of rape or threatened rape in Chaucer's works, arguing that, though Chaucer presents rape as a trope that enfigures reader response or male competition, we must recognize and confront its literal value, accepting it both in…

Assessment of Schlauch's career and criticism, focusing on her Chaucer's Constance and Accused Queens (1927; rpt. 1969). Includes a bibliography of Schlauch's publications.

Eleven essays about literary depictions of rape in Chaucer, Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, Latin comedies, Ovidian narratives, and the Philomel story. Includes an introduction by the editors, an afterword by Christopher Cannon, and a revised reprint…

Surveys the relationships between theology and poetry in late-medieval writing, assessing how Robert Grosseteste, the Pearl poet, and Chaucer communicate a proto-humanistic perspective, "characterized by a semi-Pelagian, anthropocentric theology"…

Fourteen literary studies that range across Old English, Old French, Anglo-Latin, Middle English, and medieval Irish, Spanish, and Italian. For four essays that pertain to Chaucer, search for Satura under Alternative Title.

The GP description of the Knight suggests that he wore clothing and equipment typical of "military opportunism." More specifically, the Knight's dress and career call to mind Sir John Hawkwood, and changes to the Ellesmere portrait of the Knight may…

Chaucer leaves both suffering and heroism "open to ambiguous interpretation" in KnT, prompting readers to go beyond disorder and hopelessness and discover Boethian consolation, which is anchored in recognition of the true good.

The GP description of the Knight engages late-medieval questions of war and pacifism, confronting the audience with an "ethical and political dilemma."

Creates in reconstructed Middle English a description, prologue, and tale for an additional pilgrim, the warrener. The description and prologue are in couplets (including speeches by the Host and Prioress), and the prose tale is an adaptation of the…

Suggests that collected "vidas," or "lives," of the troubadours may have served as Chaucer's model for the "portraits" of the pilgrims in GP. Individual "vidas" open anthologies of troubadour verse in some fourteenth-century manuscripts, and Chaucer…

Discussion of how the political functions of literature are framed by broader ethical and moral concerns, drawing examples from Virgil, Cervantes, Robert Frost, and CT, where the pilgrimage frame indicates that social order--the common good--is…

Examines felons and felony in Chaucer's works, focusing on CT and how such crimes reflect on the knightly class.

Chaucer's use of metonymy in CT expresses his "anxiety of circulation," which is traced through his references to the fragmented body and bodily functions, infection, magic, rhetoric, and translation. Shoaf examines relationships among tales,…

Applying Habermas's notion of discourse ethics, Schildgen focuses on stories in CT that are "set outside a Christian-dominated world." Individual chapters include discussions of KnT and SqT, MLT, WBT and FranT, PrT and MkT, and SNT. Chaucer's…

Examines the "interrelation of equivocation and desire" in PhyT, ClT, FranT, and WBPT, not in what the narrators and characters say, but through a "movement or oscillation between opposed interests." In CT, sexual politics can be found in the…

The Wife of Bath, the Prioress, and the wife in ShT represent themselves as victims of violence to make themselves attractive to men. In doing so, they draw on texts, such as medieval saints' lives and romances, that depict violence as central to the…