Browse Items (16471 total)

Describes the treatment of the rondel in manuscripts of PF as a form of code-switching, identifies resonances of PF and SqT in Charles d'Orléans's Valentine's Day poetry, and explores the implications of describing love-talk or bird-talk as a form…

Rethinks "formalism with respect to biopolitics" as articulated by Giorgio Agamben and describes "premodern and modern concepts of form, life, and rule," arguing that Chaucer's Truth, Gent, Sted, and especially For explore "the intersections between…

Focuses on marvels in medieval literature, and argues that medieval readers appreciated indeterminacy of the marvelous. Some attention to FranT.

Examines the "workings of empathy" in SqT to situate it in "premodern critical race studies, reading the "falcon-Canacee-lap" formulation as "a homo-affective assemblage, an animal human thing that blurs the borders of body, object, and species,"…

Argues that William Langland's readership may have been more like Chaucer's (and John Gower's) than has been assumed in the past, presenting evidence that readers of these authors included scribes and bureaucratic clerks such as Thomas Usk, Thomas…

Both ManT and PrT reflect the violence inherent in medieval teaching of music, especially evident in the role of tactile solmization--through the use of the Guidonian hand--in ecclesiastical tradition. In both, Chaucer suggests that music fuels the…

Reports the finds of "Dr. Lollius" who reputedly discovered, through DNA analysis of "covertly obtained slivers of parchment and vellum," that several extant Chaucer manuscript are "human skin." The pseudo-report is offered to provoke contemplation…

Considers the speaking birds in ManT and PF for the ways they suggest the "destabilization of human identity," also considering the topic in the late-fourteenth-century tale, "The Woman and the Three Parrots."

Considers the cat in MilT as a device of demarcation between the domesticity of John's house and the privacy of Nicholas's "elite" study, observing links between this use of an animal as a device with Derrida's contemplations on his cat. Also…

Argues that a "relationship between magic, spectacle, and morality . . . preoccupies a number" of fourteenth-century Middle English texts, focusing on the magical objects in SqT and other instances of magic in CT to exemplify the variety and…

Argues that John Foxe's chronological techniques, "expressive affinities," and "affective connections" in "Actes and Monuments" (a.k.a. the "Book of Martyrs") are "relevant to what is increasingly called 'post-historicist' criticism in medieval…

Investigates the "moral version of Chaucer that emerges" in Hoccleve's "Regiment of Princes," arguing that it is a kind of poetic authority produced "in the face of an increasingly militant and repressive English Church," and that, unlike other early…

Explores medieval analogies between "storytelling and merchandizing" and how both relate to gender in MLT, clarifying connections between the travel narrative, its rhetoric, and the poverty prologue, and commenting on source and analogue relations.…

Analyzes the "effect and experience" of the stained glass in HF and in Lydgate's "underappreciated remobilization" of it in his "Temple of Glass," comparing the aesthetics of the dream visions with those of late medieval glass in England, its…

Suggests that "maying" shapes participants' sexuality, thereby furthering the "ritual's enactment of social status." Uses LGW as an example of the mirroring of human qualities in the natural world.

Questions the claim that psychoanalytical medievalism is insufficiently historical. Surveys a selection of articles that may consciously or unconsciously use psychoanalytical principles, including articles that address TC and portions of CT.

Identifies connections among "war, narrative, and literary technique" in TC to show "how Chaucer constructs . . . siege as a dynamic space in which to imagine the forces that shape and determine human behaviour." Chaucer "reconfigures the idea of a…

Assesses the demonic presence in FrT (the Green Yeoman), placing "Chaucerian demonology within a wider intellectual and cultural context" from St. Augustine to the "Malleus maleficarum." Surveys views on demonic/angelic presence as apparition,…

Challenges the "dominant paradigm" for the date and composition of Bo, dismantling "several doubtful propositions"--influence on Usk's "Testament," Chaucer's use of Bo in his other works, Chaucer as a "poor Latinist." Analyzes Bo as a "late-medieval…

Assesses "self-referential reflections on storytelling" in MLT and Mel, focusing on how the "resistive narrative agency" of their female protagonists calls attention to "questions central to the literary enterprise itself," particularly through…

Assesses Chaucer's relation to Dante as one of "palpable disbelief" in the Italian's claims for authority about the afterlife and God's judgments. In MkT and HF, Chaucer adapts Dante to establish a more worldly and more skeptical sense of poetry.…

Decried by detractors such as Gower and Langland, legal discourse was a way of bridging the growing gap between legal tradition and contemporary reality. Although it satirizes legal pragmatism, The "Tale of Beryn" reflects appreciation of such…

Bokenham "strategically utilizes feminine piety" and his own "dullness" to express political dissent in a style that differs from the high rhetorical style of Gower, Chaucer, and Lydgate. He rejects their "classicizing, aureate" tradition, initiating…

Surveys the reception of Lydgate, especially his "Dance Machabré", and argues that the poet has been victimized by "'ageist' conceptions of cultural change" that seek to reify "the medieval." Lydgate's stature as the most public of English poets…

PhyT and Pearl both explore the assumption that the communal and anagogical can subsume the individual and ethical, an assumption underlying Fredric Jameson's historicist theorizing. The ending of PhyT indicates the "hermeneutic limits" of virgin…