Dor, Juliette.
Wendy Harding, ed. Drama, Narrative and Poetry in The Canterbury Tales (Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Mirail, 2003), 139-55.
The Wife of Bath's "wanderings" reflect the multivalent meanings of the word. She contravenes the codes governing female behavior, including the standards for governing noble women and the values involved in "What the Good Wife Taught Her Daughter."…
Conversions in TC are modeled ironically on those of St. Paul and St. Augustine. Like Paul, Troilus cannot escape his fate; he can only accept and serve. Like Augustine, Criseyde vainly tries to master the narrative that is out of her control.
Ambrisco describes teaching SqT as an "unsolved problem in Chaucerian reception"--SqT is a work favored by the Franklin and early readers such as Spenser and Milton, but decried or ignored by formalist critics. Opening class discussion to the…
Aloni, Gila.
Leo Carruthers and Adrian Papahagi, eds. Paroles et silences dans la littrature anglaise au Moyen Age (Paris : Association des Médiévistes Anglicistes de l'Enseignement Supérieur, 2003), pp. 119-34.
Three concerns in LGW--space in "Thisbe," rhetoric in "Lucrece," and the exchange of women in "Hypsipyle and Medea"--demonstrate that the power of apparently passive women lies in their moral superiority over men.
Allman, W. W., and D. Thomas Hanks, Jr.
Chaucer Review 38: 36-65. , 2003.
A "bodily economy of piercing men and pierced women" can be found throughout CT. Lovemaking is associated with cutting, stabbing, bleeding, and dying. The only accounts of lovemaking not connected to stabbing or bloodletting occur in the musical…
Benson, C. David.
Wendy Harding, ed. Drama, Narrative and Poetry in The Canterbury Tales (Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Mirail, 2003), pp. 22-33.
Benson argues against interpreting CT in terms of dramatic theory: the pilgrims are not fully developed human characters, nor are their tales expressions of their individual psychologies. The most developed pilgrims-the Pardoner and the Wife of…
Bloomfield, Josephine.
Essays in Medieval Studies 20: 125-33. , 2003.
In LGWP, PF, and HF, Chaucer absorbs several conventions and concerns from the commentaries that he used as sources, thereby suggesting that his audience was familiar not only with traditional texts but also with the commentaries on them.
Blandeau, Agnès.
Adrian Papahagi, ed. Métamorphoses (Paris: Association des Médiévistes Anglicistes de l'Enseignement Supérieur, 2003), pp. 229-43.
There is more to Pier Paolo Pasolini's film version of CT than mere adaptation, for the shift from one semiotic system to another implies some puzzling metamorphoses. Yet, paradoxically, the spirit of the original is cleverly restored on the screen.
Black, Nancy B.
Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003.
In narratives of falsely accused queens, the queens frequently undergo periods of exile that refine their souls through poverty and suffering. Black compares the Constance narratives by Nicholas Trevet, Gower, and Chaucer, examining each version in…
Focusing on literary depictions of maying activities in medieval records and the Roman de la Rose, Bezella-Bond assesses their depiction in Malory and in Chaucer's BD, PF, LGWP, KnT, MerT, and WBPT.
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…
Benson, Robert G., and Susan J. Ridyard, eds.
Rochester, N.Y., and Cambridge : D. S. Brewer, 2003.
Ten essays by various authors and a descriptive introduction by Derek Brewer. The papers were originally delivered at the Sewanee Medieval Colloquium at the University of the South in April 2000; the colloquium was devoted to Chaucer's work on the…
Butterfield, Ardis.
Piero Boitani and Jill Mann, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Chaucer, 2d ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003), pp. 20-36.
Butterfield surveys the French literature available to Chaucer and argues that French language and literature pervade Chaucer's entire career. The French influence is a fundamental "habit of mind" that resides in the deep and surface structures of…
Burger, Glenn.
Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2003.
CT can destabilize essentialist categories of sexuality, subjectivity, and nationality. From a queer and postcolonial perspective, CT enables or compels neither a symbolically simple London originary nor an allegorically closed ending, but rather an…
Brown, Muriel.
Michelle Sauer, ed. Proceedings of the 11th Annual Northern Plains Conference on Early British Literature (Minot, N.D.: Minot State University, 2003), pp. 82-89.
Brown approaches the loathly lady's sermon on "gentillesse" as political allegory, emphasizing "the transforming power of relinquishing control over those who work, the third estate."
Broughton, Laurel.
Jean E. Godsall-Myers, ed. Speaking in the Medieval World (Boston: Brill, 2003), 43-63.
By adjusting his source, Chaucer allows the Knight to construct a Theseus who appears noble and positively inclined toward women. Chaucer also reminds us, however, that Theseus is not always the champion of women and the exemplar of chivalry. A…
Brosamer, Matthew.
Donka Minkova and Theresa Tinkle, eds. Chaucer and the Challenges of Medievalism: Studies in Honor of H. A. Kelly (Frankfurt and New York : Peter Lang, 2003), pp. 235-51.
Brosamer investigates hell-mouth imagery in PardT, MLT, and LGWP, drawing upon a number of sources, especially De miseria condicionis humane by Pope Innocent III. The corruption of sin has an alimentary dimension, from ingestion to defecation.
Brewer, Derek.
Wendy Harding, ed. Drama, Narrative and Poetry in The Canterbury Tales (Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Mirail, 2003), pp. 127-38.
Although written for the same fourteenth-century courtly audience/readership, KnT and MilT are two very different types of narrative. One of the features of Chaucer's Gothic aesthetic was to shift between high and low styles. These two Tales…
ManT asserts a "repressive poetics" that challenges fiction-making in CT--especially in KnT--and at the same time rejects the validity of penitential self-examination offered by the Parson.
Bowden, Betsy.
William K. Finley and Joseph Rosenblum, eds. Chaucer Illustrated: Five Hundred Years of the Canterbury Tales in Pictures (New Castle, Del. : Oak Knoll; London: British Library, 2003), pp. 121-90.
Reproduces and assesses various eighteenth-century depictions of CT or the Canterbury pilgrims, including Thomas Stothard's illustrations for Bell's British Poets (1782-83), the set of pilgrim portraits (here associated with John Vanderbank) in John…
Bourquin, Guy.
Adrian Papahagi, ed. Métamorphoses (Paris: Association des Médiviéstes Anglicistes de l'Enseignement Supérieur, 2003), pp. 218-29.
In BD, the omission of the transformation of Ceyx and Alcyone--included in other versions of the narrative--runs counter to the expectation of readers, thus exacerbating the anti-consolatory element in the adjacent narrator's dream.
After a short discussion of the genesis of CT, Bourgne successively explores its structure (collection of tales; importance of commerce and exchanges; prologues; labyrinth); shifts between oral and written literatures, or audiences and readerships;…
Borroff, Marie.
New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 2003.
Ten essays by the author, three of them published here for the first time. Topics include CT, "Pearl," "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," and Shakespeare's "Hamlet." For two new essays that pertain to Chaucer, search for Traditions and Renewals under…
