Browse Items (16471 total)

In RvT, Chaucer's "treatment of the Northern dialect" is fairly consistent, but the Reeve's dialect includes "distinctive features characteristic of the Norfolk dialect."

Critics' inability to sympathize with Troilus in TC results from their failure to recognize the "medieval practical reasoning that informs Troilus's deliberations and ultimately humanizes him." His philosophising "reflects a withdrawal from the…

Richardson surveys various interpretations of the Old Man in PardT. Concentrates on the imagery of Mother Earth and of suicide, arguing that the Old Man can be seen as the Pardoner's undying soul.

Examples from "The Chronicle of Peter Langtoft," "Piers Plowman," and CT (WBP and PardP) indicate how patterns of mixed-language speech reflect the social motivations of the speakers, especially their efforts to construct authority and restrict…

In the Middle Dutch "Wrake van Ragisel" (adapted from the Old French "Vengeance Raguisel"), "Walewein, who is transformed into a dwarf, learns what women are exclusively led by their sexual desire," a different answer to the life question than is…

Chaucer modeled the prayer for the removal of the rocks on a cluster of literary precedents, from Boccaccio to Boethius, Ovid, and Marian lyrics. Chaucer was as interested in the works' interpenetration as in the ironic tensions among them.

Surveys scholarship pertaining to Chaucer's contact with Spain and suggests several routes of transmission for the influence of Juan Ruiz's "Libro de buen amor" on TC and PardT. Chaucer was probably aware of Ruiz (and other Spanish literature)…

Finlayson reads FrT as anticlerical comic satire rather than a moral exemplum, exploring similarities between the Tale and Boccaccio's story of Ciapellatto in Decameron 1.1. The probable source of FrT is a sermon by Robert Rypon, but Boccaccio may…

Heffernan discusses the nature, origins, and development of Italian "novelle"; Boccaccio's innovations with the form; and the likelihood that Chaucer had direct knowledge of The Decameron. Argues that the influence of Italian novelle generally, and…

Female involvement in construction of the Findern anthology (Cambridge University Library MS Ff 1.6) resulted in "subtle interventions" in thematic concerns of several works included in the anthology: for example, "female eloquence" (in Gower's story…

Chaucer may have intended to end MkT with the account of Zenobia--extracting it from LGW--and thereby to offer her narrative as a remedy for the Monk's "spiritual condition," which develops over the course of CT. Lindeboom compares Chaucer's…

Chaucer's allusion to the legendary Welsh bard Glascurion in HF (line 1209) is paralleled by details that survive in the traditional ballad "Glasgerion," or "Glen Kindy." Echoes of the ballad tradition are also found in Gavin Douglas's "The Palice of…

Chaucer may have tapped into traditional knowledge of the Northern god Loki in creating the description of the Pardoner in GP. Links with Loki, who transformed himself into a mare in the Old Norse "Gylfaginning," encourage us to view the Pardoner as…

Comments on discussions of Chaucer's Purse that relate the poem to Lancastrian politics, offering further corroboration that Purse is subversive.

James Holmes's "mapping technique" applied to Rom reveals a systematic reinterpretation of the French text's ambiguous language.

Lim traces "anxiety [as] the definitive characteristic of Troilus's desire" in TC.

Carney considers the two-stanza envoy to TC "in the light of Plotinus' Neoplatonic scheme of 'exitus' and 'reditus'" (ending and return).

The intended audience of the Naples manuscript was secular females, evidenced by its internal style and content of four romances and inclusion of medical recipes. The advice to wives in ClT points to the instruction of women--and thus to the intended…

In his conduct and dress, the social-climbing Reeve associates himself with the clergy--an association that the Miller recognizes and ridicules unmercifully.

The already diffuse mixture of accepted sources for FranT is complemented here with an argument favoring a debt to French fabliaux.

Suggests the "possible influence" of Horace's Ode 1.9 on Alisoun's laugh in the dark in MilT, observing similarities in erotic setting, imagery, and opposition between youth and age.

Applying ANOVA/Tukey's Range Test on nine early CT manuscripts, the author finds that none of them is based on exemplars written in more than three hands. Attributes the final ordering in the first manuscripts of CT to "the poem's first two scribes,…

Discusses how Chaucer, while aware of Boccaccio's text, continually downplays Priam's political side in order to emphasize "his interpersonal or familial bond," thus seeking "to interpret events and characters in terms of their most immediate…

The BBC adapted the bottom scenes of MilT "to suit the tastes of early evening TV spectators by eliminating the most explicit passages."

Not just a pun on beef and burping, "buf" derives from French "buffer," which refers to puffing up one's cheeks and, later, to being stuffed with food.