Beidler, Peter G., and Sierra Gitlin.
John Cartafalsa and Lynne Anderson, eds. The Joy of Teaching: A Chorus of Voices. Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, 2007, pp. 3-17.
An epistolary exchange between teacher and student on the intellectual and emotional challenges of reading Chaucer in a twenty-first century undergraduate classroom.
Bleeth, Kenneth.
Laura L. Howes, ed. Place, Space, and Landscape in Medieval Narrative (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2007), pp.107-17.
Bleeth examines the ways that gardens in TC, KnT, MerT, and FranT reveal Chaucer's discomfort with the aristocratic fantasy of "pure play," idealized in the Roman de la Rose and separated from the world.
Bloom, Harold, ed.
New York: Bloom's Literary Criticism, 2007.
Ten previously printed or excerpted essays by various authors, with an introduction by the editor, a Chaucer chronology, and a bibliography. Topics include the ending of TC (E. Talbot Donaldson); LGWP (Robert Worth Frank, Jr.); interplay between KnT…
Revisiting E. Talbot Donaldson's scholarship provokes nostalgia as well as the recognition that, for Donaldson, "poems of the order of Chaucer's arouse feelings as well as thoughts, feelings based on the critic's own experience."
Brown, Peter.
Oxford and New York : Peter Lang, 2007.
Brown traces classical and medieval study of optics in various kinds of writing, arguing that in the late Middle Ages the science of "perspectiva" became part of intellectual consciousness, influencing Chaucer and several of his models (Jean de Meun,…
Cawsey, Kathy, and Jason Harris, eds.
Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2007.
Ten essays by various authors, with an introduction by the editors and a comprehensive index. Topics range from Jerome's theory of translation to Julian of Norwich to Protestant reception of medieval literature. For three essays that pertain to…
Coleman, Joyce.
Paul Strohm, ed. Middle English (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 68-85.
Coleman clarifies differences between "aurality" and "orality," assessing references to reading aloud and speaking aloud in Middle English texts, especially Chaucer's works, and citing depictions of such practice in manuscript illustrations,…
Crocker, Holly A.
New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
Crocker investigates how the visibility and invisibility of gender in Chaucer are linked to performativity and cultural privilege, especially for men. Discusses the figurative tradition of engendering sight as background to how Prudence in Mel is the…
Dor, Juliette.
Thea Summerfield and Keith Busby, eds. People and Texts: Relationships in Medieval Literature. Studies Presented to Erik Kooper (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2007), pp. 87-98.
Comments on archival records of Chaucer scholar Caroline Spurgeon, seeking information about Spurgeon's reasons for studying the reception of Chaucer in France and England. Dor transcribes and translates into English the French text of Spurgeon's…
Fender, Janelle Diane.
Dissertation Abstracts International A67.09 (2007): n.p.
Interdependence of parts and wholes in Chaucer's works anticipates a sustained concern with fragments and remnants in later literature, especially among Reformation bibliophiles who were struggling to "re-member" the past as a form of nascent…
Fitzgibbons, Moira.
Gail Ashton and Louise Sylvester, eds. Teaching Chaucer (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 65-80.
Explores the pedagogical value of encouraging students to combine analysis and creativity in performing (aloud and in writing) from the points of view of individual Chaucerian characters. Suggests using Chaucer's characters to critique those of…
Fyler, John M.
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Following an exposition of received biblical history and medieval commentaries in which the Fall and Babel represent declensions from unity and clarity, Fyler addresses Jean's Roman, Dante's Commedia, HF, SNT, and CYT intertextually and in the…
Giancarlo, Matthew.
New York : Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Studies the intersection between the "growth of parliament" and the "development of poetry" from c.1376 to 1414, focusing on depictions of parliaments in literature. Poets such as Langland, Gower, and Chaucer had "extensive parliamentary…
Green, D. H.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Studies the literary climate of women readers, real and fictional, who inform Chaucer's world, with commentary on the depiction of women reading in TC.
Gust, Geoffrey W.
Chaucer Review 41 (2007): 311-23.
Despite his tendency to view Chaucer's narrative persona in CT autobiographically, E. Talbot Donaldson's exploration of this persona paved the way "for the proliferation of studies that have taken account of Chaucer's narrators," studies in which…
Classifies approximately 220 mythological characters that appear in Chaucer's works: supernatural creatures, human beings, and other classical references. Describes and analyzes the presence of Ascalafo, Canace, and Midas in Chaucer, focusing…
In juxtaposition to D. W. Robertson's comprehensive historicist method, E. Talbot Donaldson's "fundamentally rhetorical mode of analysis" also constituted a historicist approach, but one that moved from philological detail "toward some larger whole,"…
In opposition to Robertson's "patristic exegesis," Donaldson models a practice of engaging the autonomy of medieval texts. In the process, he adopts a critical persona that, feminist critiques notwithstanding, "is a decorous fiction which may or may…
Hopkins, Amanda, and Cory James Rushton, eds.
Rochester, N.Y.; and Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2007.
Thirteen essays by various authors, most focusing on depictions or deferrals of the erotic in Middle English romances, with other topics such as a branch of the "Mabinogi," female Jewish libido, fifteenth-century letters, and more. The editors'…
Hordis, Sandra M., and Paul Hardwisk, eds.
Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2007.
Ten essays by various authors discuss comedy in Old English literature and in several Middle English media: drama, narrative poetry, stained glass, illuminations, and misericords. For three essays that pertain to Chaucer, search for Medieval English…
Howes, Laura L., ed.
Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2007.
Eleven essays by various authors, with an introduction by the editor and a survey of spatial theory and medieval literature by John M. Ganim. For five essays that pertain to Chaucer, search for Place, Space, and Landscape in Medieval Narrative under…
Hubbard-Brown, Janet.
Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2006.
An introduction to Chaucer for elementary and junior high school students, with nine chapters arranged biographically from boyhood to "final years." Each chapter includes a quiz. The apparatus includes a chronology and timeline, a bibliography, and…
Joy, Eileen A., Myra J. Seaman, Kimberly K. Bell, and Mary K. Ramsey, eds.
New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
Ten essays by various authors, along with a foreword, an introduction, an "otherword," and an afterword. Topics range from high to low culture and explore relationships between reality and performance, including comparisons of medieval literature to…
