Browse Items (16470 total)

Teskey explores the development of "story-telling" into "literature" in English tradition, including comments on Chaucer's place in this development.

Nolan exemplifies the continuity of English versification through close metrical analyses of samples from Chaucer (Truth), Lydgate, and Wyatt. Each text "displays inherited forms at the very limits of their capacities."

Wallace explores "degrees of enclosure" for nuns and surveys representations of nuns in medieval and Renaissance literature and art. Comments on Chaucer's depictions of the Prioress and the Second Nun: Chaucer "tells us much about one of his nuns and…

Compares what PardT and Erasmus's "Pilgrimage of Pure Devotion" reveal about the "locatability" and placelessness of the Church, exclusion from Church locations, and disgust associated with such exclusion.

Lerer assesses the mid-sixteenth-century versions of Truth and TC in Tottel's "Miscellany" (among other texts) as evidence of Renaissance reception of medieval literary history.

Describes (with illustrations) the "material remainders of late medieval English practices of pilgrimage," discussing them "in the context of Chaucer's and Langland's portraits of pilgrim attire," and commenting on relations between extant badges and…

Compares ShT and FranT as works that assign different values to "the transaction for a woman's body . . . couched in the tale-teller's understanding of his own economic system." ShT reflects the coin-based economy of the "Atlantic maritime commercial…

Uses Sergej Karcevskij's theory of miscommunication to clarify the amalgamation and "redoctrinations" of various versions and interpretations of the Midas story, exploring how Chaucer's version in WBT engages Ovid's original and related materials.

Explores the semantic field of "affectus"/"affeccioun" in medieval Latin grammar, Chaucer (MilT and TC), Margery Kempe, and several devotional texts, clarifying its wide "range of meanings and connotations . . . as a feeling category term," positive…

Describes known examples of late medieval travel writing in English, discussing several ways they might be categorized. Includes commentary on pilgrimage narratives and on CT as a fictional example.

Traces attitudes toward and depictions of anarchy and apocalypse in medieval political and penitential traditions, suggesting that they can be associated with communalism as well as with disruption, then and now. Includes comments on Chaucer's (and…

Depictions of female and male aging in WBT and MerT reflect the reality that human beings wish to remain desirable "in spite of advanced aging."

O'Neill surveys Chaucer's attitudes toward age and gender in CT, with particular focus on WBPT. In CT, the "medieval, ageing Englishwoman as a sexual being emerges with . . . dignity and vitality."

After a discussion of good and evil in medieval romance, especially Arthurian matter, Goller turns to authors who express opinions about war: Wycliffe, a pacifist, and Gower and Chaucer, who are ambivalent about war. Examines Chaucer's KnT, Mel,…

Argues that Shakespeare's "Troilus and Cressida" combines the concern with Boethian logic and necessity found in TC with Ramist thinking, indicating that Edward de Vere, earl of Oxford, was the author of the play. The combination prompts a…

Tallies a number of specific "[i]nfluences, echoes, or borrowings from Chaucer in English poetic tradition as it developed between Henry Howard, earl of Surrey, and Shakespeare," mentioning familiar instances and adding ones previously unnoticed.…

Treats the Pardoner as a "foot-in-the-door salesman" who is confident in his own skills and believes that his "frankness is disarming." The "agonized sincerity" that George Lyman Kittredge perceived in lines PardT 6.916-18 is not "agonized" but…

Verse retelling of selections from CT (all but Mel, SNPT, CYPT, ManPT, and ParsPT) with reduced plots, simplified rhetoric, and modernized English in ballad stanzas. Cuddington adapts the links to unify the selections, which are arranged in the…

Chaucer's Anel explores the "dilemma of the modern poet in the late Middle Ages." The "Thebanness" of the text engages its Boethianism as a competing and fatalistic view of memory and history. Allusions to Statius, Corinna, Virgil, Ovid, Dante, and…

A research guide that review major lines of Chaucer criticism, which is becoming increasingly diverse.

This guide for undergraduates treats astrology, the zodiac, humors, therapies, Chaucer's authorities, medieval attitudes toward medicine, and the GP Physician.

The poem's central interest lies in the attempt by two human souls to establish the deepest and most testing of relationships. The representation of this relationship involves more than a dialogue: it insinuates a dialectical process that worries…

Claims that writing about painting in England began with Chaucer's "definition of visual art" in PhyT 6.9ff., sketching classical and medieval background to Chaucer's description, particularly Pliny, Bartholomeus Anglicus, John Trevisa, and the Roman…

A British Library copy of John Urry's Works of Chaucer, shelf-mark 642.m.1, contains Thomas Tyrwhitt's notes. These notes record Tyrwhitt's "progress towards his own edition," including commentary on glosses, source material, and apocrypha.

Identifies and describes portraits of authors in initials of British Museum MS. Add. 42131. Two of the three depictions of Chaucer are by the same hand as the miniature accompanying Hoccleve's Regement of Princes (Arundel MS. 38).