Browse Items (16471 total)

Explores the "iconographic vocabulary" of Pentecost and its affiliations in Wolfram von Eschenbach's "Parzival," Dante's "Inferno," Lus de Cames's "Lusiads," and Chaucer's SumT. Chaucer's version combines details from verbal and pictorial traditions…

Examines the "same-sex union of adoptive brotherhood" between the Summoner and the Pardoner and assesses the economic underpinnings of sworn brotherhood in FrT and SumT. Chaucer's alignment of homosexual and heterosexual issues in the Marriage Group…

Compares the anonymous author of "Jacob's Well" to a priest of the same type as Chaucer's Parson, or a canon such as John Mirk.

Comments on literary framing structures in manuals of religious instruction and confession, from the "Somme le Roi" to ParsT. Briefly compares ParsT to "Jacob's Well."

Parallels between Chaucer's treatment of Phebus [Apollo] and the treatments in Dante's "Paradiso" and Alain de Lille suggest that ManT reflects the literary tradition of Apollonian ineptitude and prepares the way for the Parson's Christian…

Although SNT has been considered a straightforward account of St. Cecilia, apocalyptic techniques make it more complex. Engaging apocalyptic imagination, Chaucer focuses on "eschatology, renovation, and the collapse of time."

Argues for "literary" rather than "historicist" analysis, examining the tone and rhetoric of the reference to the uprising of 1381 in NPT and arguing that Chaucer was "distancing" himself from the events.

Documents evidence of women's participation in the uprising of 1381, considering judicial records, chronicles by Henry Knighton and Thomas Walsingham, and poetic depictions by Chaucer and Gower. In the chase scene of NPT, Chaucer depicts women as…

The "remedia" for the Black Knight's loss is achieved in two parts: the "reshaping" of the Black Knight's imaginative metaphor (chess representing the art of love) and the sounding of the castle bell, which awakens the poet and "ends both hunt and…

Examines the use of prologues and epilogues in several narratives of the Reynard tradition (13th-15th centuries). NPT indicates Chaucer's preference for the prologue and the ambiguity of his assertions.

The traditions of patristic and Franciscan fourfold allegorical interpretation and radical puns are evident in Dante's letter to Can Grande and in Boccaccio, Chaucer (MkT), and Marguerite de Navarre.

In MkP, the Host associates the Monk with a sacristan or cellarer. Norsworthy surveys historical cellarers and the role of the cellarer according to the Rule of St. Benedict, connecting bad cellarers with MkT. The Monk's narratives pertain to tyrants…

The debate between Prudence and Melibee is the struggle for "maistrie" between husband and wife. Learned and sophisticated, Prudence exhibits "feminine powers of persuasion." She changes from being "humble and respectful" to being "impatient,"…

Jones considers language and its ability to represent reality in Th-MelL, arguing that unlike post-structuralist thinkers (such as Richard Rorty), Chaucer retains the "traditional distinction between history and fiction" even while cognizant of their…

Burger follows Gilles Deleuze and Féliz Guattari in associating "mapping" with modernity, resistance, and queerness and associating "tracing" with medieval times, hegemony, and heterosexuality. Explores how Mel can be seen to "map" Melibee's…

Compares and contrasts the images of medieval nuns as represented in Chaucer's Prioress and Second Nun.

The Prioress's French of "Stratford atte Bowe" (as opposed to the French of Paris) has drawn considerable speculation, but it can be examined more effectively in light of "a wider background," including Chaucer's characterization of Madame Eglantine,…

The narrator of PrT desires to transcend the particularities of language and history, echoing patterns of medieval Jewish martyrdom connected to the "kiddush ha-Shem," which may have been known in Chaucer's England. Complex textual and historical…

Cox examines verse, style, and several cruces (textual and narrative) in PrT to clarify Chaucer's ironic technique and to argue that the "prioress's hold on reality is [. . .] weak and her language correspondingly lax, with a concern for decorum far…

Throughout the decades, Chaucer critics have argued their own biases in interpreting Chaucer's ideology--seeing Chaucer as a "Christian poet"; as a "poet first and foremost"; as an "atheist"; as a writer who was "politically incorrect." Eschewing…

Explores the figure of the "puer senex" (wise youth) in "Pearl," Gower's "Confessio Amantis" ("Tale of Apollonius"), courtesy books, and PrT. Chaucer carefully presents an "ordinary world" in which the clergeon of PrT is educated through realistic…

Williams assesses the Pardoner's abuses of a wide range of signs, including words, relics, and the sacrament of the Eucharist, arguing that the Pardoner is "antisemiotic" and perverse in his privileging of signs over what they signify.

In fourteenth-century England, the sale of indulgences was supported by orthodoxy and attacked by Wycliffites. Poetic fictions transcend this simple opposition, as seen in the artful deviousness of PardT and the revitalized idealism of "Piers…

A critique of psychoanalytic approaches to medieval literature--based on the "fatal flaws" of "Freudian methods of inquiry"-and a rejection of psychoanalytic approaches to Chaucer's Pardoner, including Patterson's previous work. Patterson suggests an…

TC illustrates the mechanisms of perception, memory, and imagination as defined by fourteenth-century scientific theories. The two protagonists are enmeshed in a net of gazes--their own as well as those of others--and the narrative unfolds as viewed…