Pigg, Daniel F.
Tennessee Philological Bulletin 29 (1992): 15-23.
Placed in the context of medieval sign theory, SumT becomes a satire on reading and interpretation. The humor of the friar in the Tale depends upon seeing him as an interpreter who overlooks the literal sense of signs.
Pigg, Daniel F.
Jean E. Jost, ed. Chaucer's Humor: Critical Essays (New York and London: Garland, 1994), pp. 321-48.
Pigg traces a pattern in the Ellesmere order of CT, beginning with how the narrators circumscribe the religious comedy of MLT and ClT by keeping their plots earthbound. PhyT is a "transitional ... refiguring" that leads to the more spiritual…
PrT expresses the notion of spiritual or "white" martyrdom popular in the Middle Ages. Unlike physical martyrdom, white martyrdom was a mental act, often involving the preservation of virginity. Through the character of the little boy, the Prioress…
The Second Nun's voice is undefined by Chaucer, yet it is intriguing since it probes the nature of "agency, voice, and reappropriation." The voice of the Nun becomes more clear as her character develops, and SNT "becomes a product of the voice."
Pigg, Daniel F.
Laura C. Lambdin and Robert T. Lambdin, eds. Chaucer's Pilgrims: An Historical Guide to the Pilgrims in the "Canterbury Tales". (Westport, Conn.; and London: Greenwood, 1996), pp. 263-70.
The GP sketch of the Plowman reflects the ambiguities of late-medieval attitudes toward labor. It depicts ideals of working-class spirituality and the social realities of agriculture.
Like the fifth "passus" in the C-text of "Piers Plowman," ParsT and Ret use confession as a means of inscribing the author's identity within the poem. Langland's "autobiographical" passage--part confession, part "apologia"--integrates his…
Pigg, Daniel F.
Peter G. Beidler, ed. Masculinities in Chaucer: Approaches to Maleness in the Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde (Cambridge; and Rochester, N.Y.: D. S. Brewer, 1998), pp. 53-61.
Connects the violence implicit in the performance of the Tale with physical violence and argues that RvT portrays the perversion of masculine power.
Pigg, Daniel F.
Albrecht Classen and Connie Scarborough, eds. Crime and Punishment in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2012), pp. 347-58.
Argues that PhyT not only addresses changes in the medieval social power structure, but also serves as a "critique of masculine power" within the medieval European court system.
Pigg, Daniel F.
Albrecht Classen, ed. Death in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times: The Material and Spiritual Conditions of the Culture of Death )Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016(), pp. 263-76.
Discusses the intersection of death, money, and elements of the Catholic mass in PardT. In the wake of the plague, the mass became closely associated with death because of the spreading practice of saying masses for the souls of the dead. The…
Pigg, Daniel F.
In Albrecht Classen, ed. Magic and Magicians in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Time: The Occult in Pre-Modern Sciences, Medicine, Literature, Religion, and Astrology (Boston, Mass.: De Gruyter, 2017), pp. 489-506.
Comments on the "shadowy slippage" between science and magic in FranT and the deceptive practices evident in CYPT suggesting that "Chaucer explored magic and science" in order to distinguish between "phenomena that can be controlled" and those that…
Pigg, Daniel F.
In Albrecht Classen, ed. Incarceration and Slavery in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Age: A Cultural-Historical Investigation of the Dark Side of the Pre-Modern World (Lanham, Md.: Lexington, 2021), pp. 347-60.
Argues that the "unique aspect" of the depiction of imprisonment in KnT is that the "only liberation that can happen is apparently at the end of this life, which is seen as a prison," hence "hardly a liberation at all." Comments on Chaucer's likely…
Pigott, Margaret B.
Dissertation Abstracts International 35 (1975): 7266A
The variations in narrative structure from BD to PF reveal a shift in Chaucer's belief from faith in the capacity of experience, book, and dream as sources of absolute truth to skepticism about these same medieval traditions.
Pigott, Margaret B.
Fifteenth-Century Studies 5 (1982): 167-89.
BD and PF shift from "belief to skepticism in Chaucer's attitude toward the three principal ways of arriving at truth--religious experience, written authorities, and revelations of dreams."
Pike, David L.
Suzanne Conklin Akbari and James Simpson, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Chaucer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), pp. 351-67.
Maps out Dante's depiction of the infernal city and traces the "infernal mode of representation of urban experience," by suggesting that Dante describes the city
with an "urban variation on the vertical cosmos of the Last Judgment." Documents the…
Pinent, Pat.
Linda Cookson and Bryan Loughrey, ed. Critical Essays on The General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales (Harlow: Longman, 1989), pp. 39-49.
Considers three groups of ecclesiastical figures in CT, categorizing them by religious role and descriptive technique: 1) members of religious orders (Prioress, Monk, and Friar), who the narrator "damns by faint praise and irony"; 2) servants of the…
Pinsent, Pat.
Linda Cookson and Bryan Loughrey, ed. Critical Essays on The Pardoner's Prologue and Tale (Harlow: Longman, 1990), pp. 96-103.
Describes the "economy and pace, characterization, style, and plot-form" of PardT, comparing it with folk-tales, and summarizes the narrative functions of the "digression" on vice (6.485-660).
Pinsky, Robert, and Maggie Dietz, eds.
New York: Norton, 2000.
Anthologizes a large number of selections from responses to Robert Pinsky's request that Americans submit an example of their favorite poetry and "comment on the poem's personal significance." The volume includes GP, lines 1-18, and brief comments by…
Pinsky, Robert, and Maggie Dietz, eds.
New York: Norton, 2002.
Includes an excerpt from BD (the Black Knight's lament, lines 475-86), with Maggie Dietz's brief comments about how Middle English words "change in the mouth" (p. 128).
Pinti, Daniel (J.)
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 22: 311-40, 2000.
PF engages the same issues as does Trecento commentary on Dante's Divine Comedy, largely matters of interpretation and meaning. Part of this intertextual tradition, PF participates in and comments on the "comedic" nature of literary history, i.e.,…
Pinti, Daniel J.
Medieval Perspectives 8 (1993): 105-11.
Relies on Douglas Robinson's understanding of "synecdochic translation" as a "dialogical interaction" between the translator and a single, representative part of the source text, arguing that HF 1 creates a "rhetorically dialogic relationship" with…
Pinti, Daniel J.
Translation Review 44-45 (1994): 16-23.
Examines Gavin Douglas's "Eneados" as a work in which Mikhail Bakhtin's notions of diologism and heteroglossia help illuminate medieval translation practice. Encourages application of such an approach to medieval translators, including Chaucer.
Because a Chaucer class is often a student's only medieval course, we should incorporate fifteenth-century Chaucerian writing into our classes to expose students to the active reception of literary works, the social and/or literary uses to which…
Pinti, Daniel J.
Chaucer Review 30 (1996): 379-88.
By adding forty-five lines in "quasi-Langlandian" alliterative personification allegory to CkT, the Bodley scribe creates a second distinctive narrative voice that competes with Chaucer's own. The deliberate moral ending "governs" both Perykn and…
