Zangen, Britta.
Britta Zangen, ed. Misogynism in Literature: Any Place, Any Time (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2004), pp. 39-58.
Antifeminism is prevalent throughout CT in depictions of women, assumptions about them, and attitudes toward female-male relations. Nevertheless, CT is still considered a "master-piece" of literature, evidence that critics have not completed the work…
Bowers, John M.
Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 34 (2004): 279-307.
Three variants of KnT--Sir John Clanvowe's reading of the story of Palamon and Arcite, Chaucer's KnT, and "The Kingis Quair" of James I--provide insight into the shifting ideologies of chivalric performance and the establishment of Chaucer as a…
Cooper, Helen.
Takami Matsuda, Richard A. Linenthal, and John Scahill, eds. The Medieval Book and a Modern Collector: Essays in Honour of Toshiyuki Takamiya (Cambridge: Brewer; Tokyo: Yushodo, 2004), pp. 71-80.
Examines manuscript variants in KnT 1.2616-17 in relation to Chaucer's awareness of alliterative tradition and its lexicon, suggesting that "hurtleth" is preferable to "hurteth" at 2616 and that "born" (D Group) for "hurt" at 2617 may have been…
Hamaguchi, Keiko.
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 26 (2004): 331-54.
Explores the "postcolonial uneasiness visible" in KnT, particularly in Hippolyta's subversive mimicry in the face of efforts by Theseus and the Knight to westernize her "Amazon-ness." Emelye's powerful gaze upon the victorious Arcite reveals similar…
Børch, Marianne.
Marianne Børch, ed. Text and Voice: The Rhetoric of Authority in the Middle Ages (Odense : University Press of Southern Denmark, 2004), pp. 97-120.
Assesses Nicholas's manipulation of language and signs in MilT as Chaucer's embedded analysis of typological or analogical thinking. The references to mystery plays in MilT counterpoint the "poetics of a trickster clerk" whose manipulations embody a…
In light of sociolinguistic categories such as register, distance-solidarity, and dialect, Allman contends, RvPT and the Reeve's portrait in GP stand as sustained examinations of failed sociality and unsatisfied desire at both dramatic and narrative…
Introduces the 2002 Kathleen Williams Lecture on the sexual politics of FQ with an anecdote about a Smith College professor's delicacy with language in MilT and RvT; connects RvT with acquaintance rape.
Woods, William F.
Chaucer Review 39 (2004): 17-40.
RvT is "concerned with breaking the ranks of social hierarchy" and what causes individuals to desire such breaks. The clerks, the women, Bayard, and especially Symkyn all experience "frustrated desire," which leads Symkyn "to expand into outer or…
Fichte explores Rome in CT, both as an actual place and as a symbol. Focuses on Rome versus Syria in MLT and Christianity versus paganism in SNT, with comments on the Wife of Bath's and the Pardoner's connections with Rome, as well as orientalism in…
An Anglo-Norman piece in BL MS Harley 2253 copied about 1340 is analogous to WBP in tone, wit, and "outrageousness." Chaucer might have known this story of two women discussing the virtues of chastity versus sexual license. Includes text and…
Although erotic and homosexual elements are undoubtedly evident in SumT, certain words and gestures, particularly the friar's ill-fated grope, do not unambiguously have the homosexual charge that has been claimed.
Geltner, G.
Studies in Philology 101 (2004): 357-81.
Reexamines antimendicancy in Jean de Meun's "Roman de la Rose" and in CT, suggesting that Jean's portraits of friars should be seen primarily as portraits of hypocrisy and that Chaucer's portrayals of friars (especially in SumT) are mediated by the…
Read in the context of Proverbs 21-14 ("a gift in secret pacifieth anger; and a reward in the bosom, strong wrath"), Thomas's gift is comic and condemns Friar John.
In light of medieval commentary on sound, the fart at the end of SumT allows a wide range of "physical, political, social, clerical, and intellectual" reverberations, particularly ones associated with the Peasants' Uprising of 1381. Travis also…
Bodden, M. C.
Mark D. Meyerson, Daniel Thiery, and Oren Falk, eds. 'A Great Effusion of Blood'? Interpreting Medieval Violence (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2004), pp. 216-40.
Bodden reads ClT as Chaucer's deconstruction of the violence of hagiography. Plot and purported allegory clash in the Tale, and Walter is concerned not with Griselda's obedience but with her outward show. Virtue without will is no virtue at all. The…
In MerT and two French fabliaux ("Les perdris" and "Le prestre qui abevete"), the "victims' justifiably skeptical search for visual proof" paradoxically results in deceptive "visual confirmation." Examining how this process takes place may elucidate…
Ambrisco, Alan S.
Chaucer Review 38 (2004): 205-28.
The Squire's "bad use of occupatio and his self-conscious admissions of rhetorical inadequacy" preserve the foreign, "acknowledging Mongol cultural differences but failing to clarify the terms on which such differences rest." Through "this rhetoric…
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.
FranT and the "Tempest" share not only similarities in plot, character, and theme but also an engagement with the "status of poetry as allusion and conjuring act." The sense of "fiction dissolving into real life, and the voice of the narrator…
Chaucer's changes to source material emphasize what shapes a person and how she comes to understand and experience the world. If Virginia had continued to refuse her father and Virginius had cut off his daughter's head despite her protests, the Tale…
The discourse of PardPT "disrupts binary structures and exposes the fallacy of essentialist ideologies"; it "interrogates the literary and social consequences of identity categories" assumed in "christological exegesis." The Pardoner's relics recall…
