Browse Items (16472 total)

Assesses the squire Jankyn in light of the tradition of the court fool whose role is to dispute wittily with his lord.

Reads the arming scene of Th as burlesque: the absence of plate armor indicates Thopas's poverty and low standing.

Explores Spenser's naming Chaucer "Tityrus" and how it implies greater respect for Chaucer than for Virgil.

Discusses Chaucer's use of "Alma Redemptoris" rather than "Gaude Maria" in PrT, arguing that the choice may have influenced his characterization of the clergeon. The option was available in Chaucer's sources.

The name "Robin" was a generic name for a teller of ribald stories; it was also appropriate to a "robber" or thief.

Explains an eccentric spelling in the Hengwrt version of RvT (heem, or "home") as descending from Old Norse (East Norse "hem"), extended by a kind of imitation in Ellesmere to geen ("gone") and neen ("none"). Ellesmere also mistakes a Northern form…

Argues that "astromye" in MilT (1.3451 and 3457) is an authorial malapropism.

Proposes that "A Ghearóid déana mo dhail" (ca. 1338-56) be added to the list of analogues to WBT. It involves an interaction between a human and "fairy" being in which the human is rewarded for appropriate behavior; the outcome of the interaction…

Argues that the pilgrimage of HF 116 was to the medieval hermitage of St. Leonard, two miles west of Windsor Castle; the associated weariness evokes the use of pilgrimages for amorous trysts.

An eight-line poem reminiscent of Chaucer's For in both theme and word choices survives in three copies (transcribed here), each in a different hand, written upside down on the final folio of this heraldic manuscript.

For both linguistic and political reasons, the town in RvT from which John and Aleyn hail may be identified as Westruther in Berwickshire, making Chaucer's rendition of their speech "the first imitation of Scots dialect in English literature."

Among the four fabliaux in London, British Library Harley MS 2253, "La gageure," featuring the "misdirected kiss" motif, is an analogue of MilT, while "Le chevalier e la corbeille" is a possible source, providing not only a container that forces "the…

Glossed in "The Riverside Chaucer" as "illusionists, magicians," tregetours cause their subjects to experience "a fall from cognitive certitude to amazement and bafflement," a result that is captured in the "associational field" that includes both…

Shows that "rake" in the proverbial simile "thin as a rake/rail" (first attested in English in the GP description of the Clerk's horse, I.288) means a fodder crib.

Cobbes's dense annotations of Nicholas of Lynn's "Kalendarium" in University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, MS 522 may reflect this seventeenth-century book collector's familiarity with the British Library, MS Additional 23002 text of Astr.

"Arthur and Gorlagon" and WBPT share numerous misogynist topoi as well as the plot element of a mission to understand women. The Latin romance is thus "a more significant analogue for the combined Prologue and Tale . . . than has been recognized."

Two Anglo-Latin "celibacy poems" use "quoniam" to mean the same thing that it means in WBP, prompting the question, might a "joke have been circulating among thirteenth and fourteenth century clerics, that every "quare" has its 'quoniam'?"

Adds to the group of manuscripts identified by Carl Grindley in 1995 (one of which was a concordance to the works of Chaucer), two more written in the same hand: MSS 621 and 622. The former is on the grammar of Robert of Gloucester, the latter on…

Echoes of Peraldus's notion of sin as "amor inordinatus" in the section of ParsT on contrition and confession, thought to have been adapted primarily from Pennaforte, suggest that the former's "Summa de vitiis" "exerts a more significant influence on…

Rebinding and rearrangement of John Dart's biography of Chaucer in one of the six seventeenth- and eighteenth-century editions of his work held in Paris, effectively reframe it as having been modeled "culturally and linguistically from French…

In rendering Petrarch's explanation for why God tests humans in the form of a disjointed sentence (ClT, 1153-61), Chaucer points out its irrationality. Argues how this ploy resonates with the Clerk's expression of qualms about Petrarch at the…

Given his "frequent equivocalness" on matters of high seriousness, there is good reason to believe that Prov, a "riddling poem" (NIMEV 3914), is Chaucer's work, philologists' objections on the basis of its inaccurate "compace"/"embrace" rhyme…

In this "first printed work of English vernacular literary criticism" (dated 1575), Gascoigne refers to ParsT (10.43) in arguing "For it is not inough to roll in pleasant woordes, nor yet to thunder in Rym, Ram, Ruff, by letter (quoth my master…

Although the phrase "Colle oure dogge" (NPT 7.338) has been cited as support for the notion that "collie" derives from a medieval pet name, a review of attestations of "colle" provides no evidence that dogs given that name tended to be members of the…

Explains that imitations of northern pronunciations in RvT, preserved in the Hengwrt and Ellesmere manuscripts, provide evidence that the shift of "a" from /a:/ to /ɛ:/ was underway in northern England during the fourteenth century. Notes similar…