Compares the theme of forced marriage in WBT, "The Marriage of Sir Gawaine," "The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnell," and Gower's "Tale of Florent." While all the works concern forced marriages, Chaucer's knight undergoes "greater coercion,"…
Fleissner, Robert F.
Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 86 (1985): 197-98.
"Loy" may refer to the law (from Old French "loy"), compounding the irony of the Prioress's oath "by Seinte Loy." In "taking an oath by the Law 'per se'," she would have taken a stand against unprincipled, secular swearing.
Recent studies have attributed psychological realism to CT characters. This "old critical ghost" unfortunately diverts the "critic from his (or her) proper task, the analysis of the functioning of verbal constructs constituting the text, to…
Thundy, Zacharias P.
Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 86 (1985): 343-47.
Derived from Matheolus's "Lamentationes," the two crowns or "corones" in TC 2.1935 are rewards for Troilus's fidelity in marriage and his heroic death in the Trojan war.
"Panne" in Chaucer's day sometimes designated a piece of clothing, sometimes a cooking utensil--and popular tradition associated the devil in hell with "pannes" (cooking utensils) and cauldrons. Chaucer's early audiences would have recognized in FrT…
Grennen, Joseph E.
Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 86 (1985): 489-93.
The prayer for might to "make in som comedye" (TC 5.1788) is not a scribal error but an indication that Chaucer may have seen the poet, like God, as a creator who enters his own fictive world and creates from "within" it.
Evans, Murray J.
Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 87 (1986): 218-28.
An "ideological approach" to TC demands the appropriation of discordant elements by a single dominant principle; a rhetorical analysis of the ending of TC, when combined with structuralist categories, suggests that Chaucer engaged in a multiple…
Fyler, John M.
Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 87 (1986): 564-68.
"Cloude," the word that ends the narrator's description of his celestial journey, calls attention to the diminished vision of Geffrey compared to that of Boethius's Thought, and the blurred understandings and dream categories offered in HF. The word…
Gillam, Doreen M. E.
Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 88 (1987): 192-99.
The charged "psychological context" of the GP description of the Pardoner as a mare can be partly reconstructed on linguistic evidence. Later English usage, as well as earlier French and Old Norse citations, indicates that the noun commonly meant…
Chaucer's insertion of an imitation of a passage from the "Poetria nova," in place of the proper matter translated from "Il Filostrato," suggests Chaucer's disdain for the "rough haste" of Boccaccio's style and his "impetuosa manus" (TC 1.1067).
Sleeth, Charles R.
Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 89 (1988): 174-84.
The invocations of a mother's advice in WBP, PardT, and MkT, in contrast to the wisdom of "Oure Lady" invoked by the two nuns in CT, become an ambiguous source of authority not in themselves but because of the actions they appear to justify.
Favorable descriptions of persons in heroic writings generally emphasize gross size, erect posture, and directness in approach, whereas courtly texts, such as Chaucer's, represent largeness as unattractive or unrefined. The latter clearly value…
Reed, Thomas L.,Jr.
Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 89 (1988): 44-56.
The fall of Nebuchadnezzar is the only history in MkT that ends favorably for its protagonist; in its tragicomic structure and its transformation of the hero to a birdlike beast, this episode anticipates some main features of NPT.
The Pardoner's 100 marks (PardP 390) correspond strikingly to the amount stipulated by Lady Clare, Elizabeth de Burgh (grandmother to the wife of young Geoffrey Chaucer's lord, Prince Lionel) to have prayers and good works performed for her soul and…
Blake, N. F.
Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 90 (1989): 295-310.
Closer attention to external and internal evidence should make scholars more cautious about accepting as canonical such passages as NPE, BD 31-96, Ret, and the lists of Chaucerian works in MLT and LGWP.
Finnegan, Robert Emmett.
Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 92 (1991): 457-62.
Textual evidence suggests that the friar may be the father of the dead child--rendering the squire Jankyn (little John, the diminutive of the friar) the projection of the central character's sinfully fathered child.
Edwards, A. S. G.
Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 92 (1991): 469-70.
In one version of the versified Stacions of Rome, the word "prose" clearly designates a change of subject rather than nonmetrical writing. In MLP, "prose" may signal a verse tale of historical and religious significance.
Fleissner, Robert F.
Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 92 (1991): 75-81.
Verbal echoes, connections of character, and other allusive possibilities suggest relationships between Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing, and TC and parts of CT.
