Mieszkowski, Gretchen.
New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
Western tradition bifurcates the go-between into two separate traditions: the first, working for idealized love; the second, working for lustful sexual conquest. Mieszkowski surveys go-between figures in medieval tradition and discusses how Pandarus…
Explores Criseyde's "Boethian pragmatism" and her agency in TC, considering how they conflict with social gender-based social constraints and the constraints of the romance genre. The "incompatibility of Boethian philosophy and the romance genre…
Briefly sketches the methodology of Nakao's 2004 study The Structure of Chaucer's Ambiguity, proposes a framework to describe how Chaucer's ambiguity may occur, and examines TC 5.1084 within that framework.
Ransom, Daniel J.
Chaucer Review 41 (2006): 206-12.
Troilus's reference to Apollo speaking "out of a tree" (TC 3.543) is likely not a reflection of Chaucer's misunderstanding Ovid. Numerous authors Chaucer may have read, including Bartholomaeus Anglicus, provide grounds for the conclusion that the…
Saunders, Corinne [J.]
Corinne Saunders, ed. A Concise Companion to Chaucer (Malden, Mass.; Oxford; and Victoria: Blackwell, 2006), pp. 134-55.
Saunders traces elements of Chaucer's "rarefied treatment of love" to Marie de France, Chrétien de Troyes, troubadours, trouvères, and Ovid, arguing that Chaucer developed a notion of "fin' amors" to treat philosophical questions as well as the…
Summit, Jennifer.
Seth Lerer, ed. The Yale Companion to Chaucer (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006), pp. 213-42.
Book-by-book examination of TC, with consistent concern for the characters (especially Criseyde) and the construction of their subjectivities. Summit explores the poem's ongoing concern with how textuality and literary transmission are deeply related…
Windeatt, Barry.
Helen Cooney, ed. Writings on Love in the English Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), pp. 81-97.
Windeatt assesses the uncertainties and experiences of love in TC and considers aspects of Chaucer's humanism and experimentalism. Rather than condemning worldly love, TC explores its many variations.
Boffey, Julia.
Ursula Schaefer, ed. The Beginnings of Standardization: Language and Culture in Fourteenth-Century England (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2006), pp. 61-70.
Analyzes the terms - "song," "dite," "tretyse," etc. - used for short poems in Middle English, including terms in Chaucer's works.
Holsinger, Bruce.
Seth Lerer, ed. The Yale Companion to Chaucer (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006), pp. 179-212.
Holsinger explores each of Chaucer's lyrics and short poems, explicating tensions of form and theme and explaining Chaucer's "cagey manipulation" of metrical and lyric conventions - English, French, and Italian. Rarely an inventor, Chaucer was a…
Scattergood, John.
Ardis Butterfield, ed. Chaucer and the City (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2006), pp. 162-73.
Chaucer's begging poem reflects his anxieties about money within the complex moneyed economy of fourteenth-century London. Reprinted in Scattergood's Occasions for Writing: Essays on Medieval and Renaissance Literature, Politics, and Society…
Sturges, Robert S.
College Literature 33 (2006): 52-76.
Sturges assesses the Pardoner and Kit from the Prologue to Beryn as "comic critiques" of fifteenth-century urban concerns about class and gender. Three metaphors define urban space in the narrative: cathedral, walls, and tavern.
Milowicki, Edward J.
Keith Busby and Christopher Kleinhenz, eds. Courtly Arts and the Art of Courtliness: Selected Papers from the Eleventh Triennial Congress of the International Courtly Literature Society. University of Wisconsin-Madison, 29 July-4 August 2004 (Cambridge, D. S. Brewer, 2006), pp. 477-88.
Milowicki advances several "speculations" about Chaucer's "French connections," particularly his possible introduction at the French court to the "study of the stars" and to the controversy of the relationship between astronomy and astrology…
Haydock, Nickolas.
Atenea (University of Puerto Rico) 26 (2006): 107-29.
Haydock reads Caxton's spurious ending and epilogue to HF in the 1483 Book of Fame as a "canny as well as sympathetic reaction to the poem's ubiquitous concern with the transmission of literature."
Tuttle, Peter, trans.
New York: Barnes & Noble, 2006.
Facing-page translation of selections from CT: GP, KnT, MilT, RvT, WBPT, ClT, FranT, PardPT, and NPT. Includes a chronology, brief notes (pp. 503-18), a survey of commentary on Chaucer through the ages, four discussion questions, suggestions for…
Knutson, Karla.
Bruce E. Brandt and Michael S. Nagy, eds. Proceedings of the 14th Northern Plains Conference on Earlier British Literature, April 7-8, 2006 (Brookings, S.Dak.: English Department, South Dakota State University, 2006), pp. 95-106.
Knutson argues that fifteenth-century imitators of Chaucer identified themselves as descendants of Chaucer, whom they constructed as father, to promote a conservative agenda, simultaneously antifeminist, hierarchical, and heteronormative.
The choices between ye and thou in CT are governed by the "interactional status of the characters," a set of principles differing "considerably from modern address systems." Jucker surveys previous criticism on the topic and assesses exchanges and…
Knappe, Gabriele, and Michael Schümann.
Studia Anglica Posnaniensia 42 (2006): 213-38.
Chaucer's use of thou and ye usually follows the standard pattern of his day. Some pronoun switching does appear, sometimes because of rhyme or textual variants but often because Chaucer uses a common formula, quotation, or other habitual lexical…
Brandt, Bruce E., and Michael Nagy, eds.
Brookings, S.Dak.: English Department, South Dakota State University, 2006.
Thirteen papers on topics ranging from Old English to eighteenth-century British literature. For three papers that pertain to Chaucer, search for Proceedings of the 14th Northern Plains Conference on Earlier British Literature under Alternative…
Collette, Carolyn P.
Turnhout, Belgium : Brepols, 2006.
Collette surveys literary and historical evidence that women in the Anglo-French tradition played the role of mediator, i.e., someone who "negotiates, bridges, and unites differences"--evidence of the "ideology and practice of women's agency" in the…
