Wood, Marjorie Elizabeth.
Comitatus 37 (2006): 65-85.
Anxious about the threat of Eastern hegemony and the increasing authority of merchant women, the narrator of MLT crafts characters that subtly feminize the East, "Orientalize" the feminine, and discredit women's economic participation as a threat to…
Bardsley, Sandy.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006.
Includes brief discussion of the Wife of Bath's claim that verbal disorder is the special preserve of women; in this way, the Wife shares important parallels with the unruly wife of Noah in the Chester and York Flood plays.
Baumgardner, Rachel Ann.
Medieval Forum 5 (2006): n.p.
Read against Foucault's "What Is an Author?" the Wife of Bath of WBP fits the criteria for representation of a "third ego." Thereby, she can be seen as a character who "establishes her own personality." Chaucer serves as a "medium for her determined…
Desmond, Marilynn.
Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2006.
Desmond studies the discourse of erotic violence in medieval literature and iconography, surveying depictions of the "mounted Aristotle" and focusing on the adaptations of material from Ovid's "Ars Amatoria" found in the letters of Héoïse and…
Driver, Martha W.
Helen Cooney, ed. Writings on Love in the English Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), pp. 147-62.
Driver explores how the Roman de la Rose was "re-written" for late medieval audiences in various ways: Chaucer advocates contemporary views of the work in his adaptation of La Vieille in WBP, and Pizan criticizes such views in her Book of the Three…
Kassell, Lauren.
Journal of the History of Ideas 67.1 (2006): 107-22.
Following a methodology outlined in Gabriel Naud's seventeenth-century history of magic, the essay examines early modern historical accounts of magic to understand how magic came to be defined and debated. The title derives from WBT.
Mathur, Indira.
Jean-Paul Debax, ed. Actes de l'atelier "Moyen Age" du XLVe congrès de la SAES (Société des Anglicistes de l'Enseignement Supérieur). Paris: Publications de l'Association des Médiévistes Anglicistes de l'Enseignement Supérieur, 2006, pp. 101-10.
Establishes a link between the "preamble" in WBP and the sermon genre.
Minnis, Alastair.
Nicola McDonald, ed. Medieval Obscenities (York: York Medieval Press, 2006), pp. 156-78.
Explores the "connection between dirty words and dirty things," focusing on the speech of "three outspoken female figures": Raison and La Vieille from the "Roman de la Rose" and Chaucer's Wife of Bath. While Raison attacks "linguistic equivocation"…
Minnis, Alastair.
Helen Cooney, ed. Writings on Love in the English Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), pp. 99-114.
In the Wife of Bath, Chaucer radically remakes La Vieille from the Roman de la Rose, granting her true wisdom and authority. The Wife of Bath successfully uses Latin tradition and academic techniques in WBP, and WBT reflects the profound wisdom of…
Scheitzeneder, Franziska.
PhiN: Philologie im Netz 36 (2006): 44-59.
Reads the opposition between the Clerk and the Wife of Bath in light of Derrida's opposition between the structuralist desire to decipher signs and the poststructuralist impulse to play with the "instability of signs." The Wife is an "anachronistic…
Shimomura, Sachi.
New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
Set against the eschatology of the Last Judgment, medieval narratives prompt their audiences to employ complex - often deferred - criteria for interpretation or evaluation. Shimomura considers how audience judgment is engaged and complicated in…
While the knight of WBT returns from his quest with the word that saves his life - "sovereynetee" - he never understands its meaning: "independence and self-government." The wedding-night conversation between the knight and the "wyf" demonstrates her…
Phillips, Helen.
Ruth Evans, Helen Fulton, and David Matthews, eds. Medieval Cultural Studies: Essays in Honour of Stephen Knight (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2006), pp. 123-37.
Phillips explores verbal, narrative, and thematic parallels between FrT and Robin Hood tales such as "Robin Hood and Guy of Gisburne." Emphases on "grenewode," archery, disguise, commercialism, ecclesiastical corruption, oppression of the poor, and…
Studying SumT with John Gay's 1717 poem "An Answer to the Sompner's Prologue of Chaucer" reveals a continuum of greed in SumT, moving from goods of use value, to coins of exchange value, to excrement and insubstantial air, even as Chaucer satirizes…
Allusions in SumT to the "silent canon" - the clerical practice of offering the Eucharistic consecration prayers silently - open a window on "lay-clerical relations," exposing the politics governing access to the secrets of the Eucharist. Through its…
Ashe, Laura.
Modern Language Review 101 (2006): 935-44.
If reading is a transformative act, then Griselda's unwavering "reading" of Walter as a loving husband ultimately transforms him so that Walter's will conforms with hers. Thus, her association with the Clerk (especially as aligned against the…
Denny-Brown, Andrea.
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 28 (2006): 77-115.
Denny-Brown assesses the vacillations between sartorial richesse and rudenesse in ClT, examining the gender and class implications of Griselda's dressing, undressing, and redressing and counterpointing Walter's attitudes toward clothing and material…
Frese, Dolores Warwick.
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 28 (2006): 249-56.
Frese reads water, dressing, and "suckling" imagery in Boccaccio, Petrarch, and ClT as vestiges of Dante's concern in "De vulgari eloquentia" with using "vernacular" language for "literature of lasting value."
Goodwin, Amy W.
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 28 (2006): 231-35.
Goodwin explores the practical problems of source study - terminology and the constraints of publication - in relation to ClT. Comments on Boccaccio's and Philippe de Mézières' Griselda stories as "sources of invention" for Chaucer's version.
Patterson, Lee.
Bonnie Wheeler, ed. Mindful Spirit in Late Medieval Literature: Essays in Honor of Elizabeth D. Kirk (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), pp. 187-210.
Patterson reads ClT in light of negotiations over the marriage of Richard II and Isabelle of France in 1396 and of the texts surrounding those negotiations, especially those concerned with the ideology of sacral kingship. Chaucer knew of the marriage…
Palmer, James M.
Chaucer Review 41 (2006): 197-205.
Considered in the light of writings by thirteenth-century ophthalmologist Benvenutus Grassus, January's blindness in MerT is no sudden infirmity. With his admitted habit of "overindulgence" in women, food, and drink, January has been working on…
Harwood, Britton J.
Studies in Philology 103 (2006): 26-46.
Explores gift-giving in Part 5 of CT, from the magical gifts given to Ghengis Khan in SqT to the concern with generosity that ends FranT. Uses Derridean notions of gifts and exchange to argue that the sequence is Chaucer's means to "erase…
Cartlidge, Neil.
Helen Cooney, ed. Writings on Love in the English Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), pp. 115-30.
In FranT, Chaucer presents a "moral dilemma that might be described as scholastic in its contrived intractability." The "quaestio disputanda" posed at the end of FranT compels readers to confront the Tale's irresolvable legal complexities of…
Dobbs, Elizabeth A.
Chaucer Review 40 (2006): 289-310.
Aurelius's comparison of himself to the nymph Echo early in FranT enables glimpses of Narcissus in Dorigen and emphasizes the importance of speech and interpretation in the Tale: in particular, Aurelius's Echo-like interpretations of Dorigen's…
