Jones, Timothy S., and David A. Sprunger, eds.
Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications, 2002.
Fourteen essays by various authors in honor of John Block Friedman, covering topics that include Anglo-Saxon, Mandeville's Travels, Cleanness, Gesta Herwardi, Froissart's "Debate of the Horse and the Greyhound," apocrypha, insanity, nude Cyclops, and…
Jones, Timothy S.
Sheila Delany, ed. Chaucer and the Jews: Sources, Contexts, Meanings (New York and London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 109-32.
Surveys various allusions to and summaries of the story of David in English medieval tradition (including allusions in MLT, MerT, and Mel), arguing that treatments of the story reveal simultaneous desires: to embrace Hebrew Scripture as authentic and…
Iyeiri, Yoko, and Margaret Connolly, eds.
Tokyos : Kaibunsha, 2002.
Fourteen essays by various authors, seven on Old and Middle English linguistics and seven on medieval literature, including romance and Arthurian literature, Chaucer, Malory, Caxton, devotional writing, and manuscript studies. The volume includes an…
Glancy, Ruth.
Westport, Conn.; and London:: Greenwood, 2002.
Glancy surveys twenty-nine themes (some with sub-themes) in British poetry, describing their occurrence from the late Middle Ages to the present. Topics include beauty, death, love, old age, sleep, and war. Glancy summarizes Chaucer's Marriage Group…
Fradenburg, L. O. Aranye.
Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 2002.
Fradenburg theorizes a new combination of historicism and Lacanian psychoanalysis and explores the medieval idea of sacrifice and its role in cultural production. Linking ethics and desire, sacrifice is a way of pursuing and prolonging desire, even…
Fisiak, Jacek, ed.
Studies in English Language and Literature, no. 2. Frankfurt am Main : Peter Lang, 2002.
Thirty essays by various authors, addressing synchronic and diachronic issues in English language study--lexicon, grammar, morphology, phonology, prosody, dialect, scribal variation, and syntax. Includes a curriculum vitae, a bibliography of Oizumi's…
Delany, Sheila, ed.
New York and London : Routledge, 2002.
Fourteen essays by various authors who study Jews as an absent presence in medieval England, considering fourteenth- and fifteenth-century texts for their literary, historical, theological, and visual representations of Jews. Some essays reprinted.…
Feminist poststructuralist approach to TC, LGW, HF, and MLT that emphasizes the instability of readers as well as texts and indicates possibilities for subversive readings.
Crane, Susan.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002.
Crane investigates a wide range of cultural rituals, demonstrating how identity was performed in late medieval England and how such performances make meaning and establish identity. She explores the Chaucer coat of arms as self-representation rooted…
Chaucer's "doubleness" in critical tradition results from combinations of self-deprecation and extravagant claims to poetic authority in his works. In 1592, Robert Greene depicted Chaucer as short, whereas the frontispiece of Speght's 1598 edition…
Constructs a model for the reception of Gower's "Confessio Amantis" that accommodates its combination of English, marginal Latin glosses, and very difficult Latin prefatory verses. Clerk-prelectors probably studied the work before performing…
Examines the English educational system in Chaucer's time, tracing the paths from parish schools to the universities indicated in the GP portraits of the Clerk and the Parson.
Burrow, J. A. .
Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Explores the functions and significances of "non-verbal signs" (glancing, pointing, winking, hand-clasping, kissing, bowing, etc.) in medieval literature, concentrating on Dante's Commedia, the romances of Chrtien de Troyes, Froissart's Chronicles,…
Bloom, Harold.
Harold Bloom. Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds. New York: Warner, 2002, pp. 102-9.
Impressionistic praise of Chaucer's ability to combine human sensitivity with comedy, his refusal to be cowed by Dante, his characterizations, and his irony.
Explores the link between fear of God and literary expression, usually manifested as "overwhelming prolixity." Considers several of the tales in CT as part of this exploration.
Archibald, Elizabeth.
Elizabeth Barnes, ed. Incest and the Literary Imagination (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002), pp. 17-38.
Although the Catholic Church in the twelfth century had developed "extraordinarily rigorous" prohibitions against intermarriage by persons related by blood, by the thirteenth century these standards had to be relaxed. Archibald discusses various…
Youmans, Gilbert, and Xingzhong Li.
Donka Minkova and Robert Stockwell, eds. Studies in the History of the English Language: A Millennial Perspective (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2002), pp. 153-75.
Argues that Chaucer's decasyllabic lines are based on metrically significant, statistically normative feet, with clear and significant caesuras. Chaucer's and Shakespeare's iambic lines deviate from prototypical lines in similar ways. See Thomas…
Sociohistorical commentary on the rise of prestige markers in English writing and speech, focusing on accent as a marker in Chaucer's time and soon after, in particular the pronunciation of final -e, the Great Vowel Shift, and northern dialect…
Linguistic and philosophical notions underlying the idea of "cosyn to the dede" fascinate Chaucer and Jean de Meun, who follow Plato and Augustine in accepting that signs reveal ultimate meaning and that myths relate to eternal ideals.
Pakkala-Weckström, Mari.
Journal of Historical Linguistics 3: 151-73, 2002.
Examines "politeness strategies" (ye/thou) and emotional language in light of genre expectations and characterization. In MilT, MerT, and ShT, wives use various linguistic strategies to manipulate their husbands and others, but the linguistic…
