Williams, Deanne.
Seth Lerer, ed. The Yale Companion to Chaucer (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006), pp. 147-78.
Williams summarizes the plots and themes of BD, PF, HF, and LGW, emphasizing Chaucer's layering of sources, his valorizing of English, and his concerns with interpretation and the truth value of literature.
Coletti, Theresa.
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 28 (2006): 1-40.
Coletti compares HF with Christine de Pizan's "Livre du chemin de long estude," exploring their differing comments on and responses to their shared literary culture. Through parallel narrative gestures, the two poets consider textual authority,…
Coleman, Joyce.
Carolyn P. Collette, ed. The Legend of Good Women: Context and Reception (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2006), pp. 33-58.
Coleman surveys the betrothals, marriage, and literary patronage of Philippa of Lancaster, suggesting that she may have given Chaucer a copy of Deschamps's "Ballade 765," which may have helped to inspire Chaucer's interest in flower and leaf debates…
Collette, Carolyn P., ed.
Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2006.
Eight essays by various authors, with an index and an introduction by the editor, who argues that Alceste's mediation is central to LGW, a poem about the "public dimension of ideal female behavior." The poem is best understood in the context of late…
Excerpted from Chaucer's LGW and thus lacking a narrative frame, the Legend of Thisbe in the Findern manuscript leaves room for the assumption that the manuscript's female readers saw Thisbe "as simply a victim." The excerpt's codicological context,…
Edwards, Robert R.
Carolyn P. Collette, ed. The Legend of Good Women: Context and Reception (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2006), pp. 59-82.
Explores the "political erotics" of LGWP, especially the G version, assessing how Cupid's treatment of the narrator and Alceste's intercession reflect political conditions, concepts of tyranny, and notions of loyalty and fidelity.
Fumo, Jamie C.
Carolyn P. Collette, ed. The Legend of Good Women: Context and Reception (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2006), pp. 157-75.
Intertextual connections among LGWP, Ret, and the end of TC capitalize on the medieval scholastic literary theory of the co-authorship of books by human authors and God ("duplex causa efficiens"). All three works remind audiences of authorial…
New facets of Chaucer's writing on love, consolation, and repentance are illuminated when we assume that Chaucer did translate Pseudo-Origen's "De Maria Magdalena," as he claims to have done in LGWP G418 ("Orygenes upon the Maudeleyne").
McCormick, Betsy.
Carolyn P. Collette, ed. The Legend of Good Women: Context and Reception (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2006), pp. 105-31.
McCormick outlines game theory and summarizes the medieval rhetorical tradition in which debate and dream vision were memorial and ethical media. She describes how exempla were used in the "Querelle des Femmes," arguing that LGW engages the…
McDonald, Nicola F.
Carolyn P. Collette, ed. The Legend of Good Women: Context and Reception (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2006), pp. 176-97.
McDonald describes the principles and operation of two late medieval ribald games of "amorous divination" - Ragman Roll and Chaunce of Dice - as a means to explore the female audience for such games and related literature, particularly LGW. "Demandes…
Meecham-Jones, Simon.
Carolyn P. Collette, ed. The Legend of Good Women: Context and Reception (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2006), pp. 132-56.
In LGW, Chaucer sets classical action in the context of Christian notions of moral intention; he poses a range of subtly differentiated portraits of difficulty in recording truth in human terms and human time. Knowability, the narrator's presence,…
Quinn, William A.
Carolyn P. Collette, ed. The Legend of Good Women: Context and Reception (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2006), pp. 1-32.
Quinn describes the "performance" features of each of the manuscripts and printed editions of LGW, exploring ideas of oral composition, performance theory, and performativity. Addresses how each witness to the text of LGW shapes the "protocols of…
Robertson, Kellie.
New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
Five chapters explore the "effects of labor laws" on vernacular writing in late medieval England: chronicles, anonymous dream visions, LGW, the Paston letters, and morality plays. Robertson focuses on interactions between theories of labor and…
Warren, Nancy Bradley.
Carolyn P. Collette, ed. The Legend of Good Women: Context and Reception (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2006), pp. 83-104.
The "Amazonian" associations - legendary and figurative - of the women in LGW and KnT align the two narratives and suggest that the passive or intercessory roles of royal women in Chaucer's society entailed the "absent presence" of threat to that…
Zissos, Andrew.
International Journal of the Classical Tradition 13.2 (2006): 165-85.
Zissos surveys the reception of Valerius Flaccus's "Argonautica," briefly discussing Chaucer's references to the author and the work in LGW, identified by E. F. Shannon in 1929. Chaucer was the first to refer to the poem after the postclassical…
The antecedent of "hyre" in PF 284 must be Venus rather than Diana. This reading reveals the logic of Chaucer's placement of Callisto and Atalanta at the head of his list of famous lovers and leads "inexorably to the conclusion that one wastes one's…
Horobin, Simon.
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 28 (2006): 205-15.
Horobin describes and transcribes a single-leaf, forty-eight line fragment of Rom (lines 2403-50), newly found among the Reverend Joass portion of the Sutherland collection of the National Library of Scotland. Also considers relationships among this…
Carruthers, Mary (J.)
Representations 93 (2006): 1-21.
Carruthers reevaluates Troilus's weeping and lamentation in Book 4 of TC in the context of monastic tradition, including the works of Peter of Celle and Galen, that sees links "among perception, sensation, and rational process."
The white eagle of Criseyde's dream of TC 2.925-931 is a "superimposition of the eagle of Purgatorio IX and the doves of Inferno V"; it links the love affair of TC with that of Dante's ruined Paolo and Francesca. The mating of doves and eagles in…
Edwards, Robert R.
New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
Seven chapters on topics related to Ovid, Augustine, Hloïse and Abélard, Marie de France, Dante, Roman de la Rose, and Chaucer's relations with Boccaccio and Dante in TC. Grounded in Augustinian, Ovidian, and biblical models, TC (lines 5.540 ff.)…
Gasse, Rosanne.
E. L. Risden, ed. "Sir Gawain" and the Classical Tradition: Essays on the Ancient Antecedents (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2006), pp. 121-34.
Gasse reads references to Achilles in TC as indications that the story of Achilles "is clearly the mirror of Troilus's narrative." References to Achilles in Gower's "Confessio Amantis" and in "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" can help readers…
Argues that TC is largely concerned with "certitude and volition as they pertain to human perception and judgment" and as they relate to late medieval philosophical discussions of divine omnipotence and divine self-limitation. Troilus, Pandarus, and…
Klassen, Norm.
Corinne Saunders, ed. A Concise Companion to Chaucer (Malden, Mass.; Oxford; and Victoria: Blackwell, 2006), pp. 156-76.
Klassen deconstructs concepts of genre and romance and medieval definitions of tragedy as they pertain to TC. Analyzes Troilus's "double sorwe," references to romance within TC, and the significance of Chaucer's phrase "litel bok." The poem…
Lynch, Andrew.
Corinne Saunders, ed. A Concise Companion to Chaucer (Malden, Mass.; Oxford; and Victoria: Blackwell, 2006), pp. 113-33.
Lynch explains the centrality of the legend of Troy to European narratives as a symbol of human instability and as a mirror of the present, especially in late medieval London. In comparison to its sources, TC keeps war on the periphery of the love…
