Browse Items (16472 total)

Medieval commentaries on the "Commedia" (Divine Comedy) inform our understanding of how Chaucer read Dante. In the Hugolino episode of MkT, with its reference to Dante, Chaucer simultaneously authorizes "Inferno" 33 and destabilizes it, exemplifying…

Reprints eleven essays or book chapters pertaining to Chaucer's reception, with topics such as scribal habits, Chaucer's influence on later poets, Chaucerian apocrypha, and others.

Spanish prose adaptations of selections from CT (GP, WBT, ClT, PhyT, and Ret), designed for juvenile readers. Includes several study questions and background information. Illustrated by Román Varela.

An illustrated interview with Harold Bloom, with commentary and contributions by others. The section entitled "Chaucer and the Creation of Character" includes Bloom's suggestion that the Pardoner is a precursor to Shakespeare's Iago and Edmund, and…

Comparison of Chaucer's NPT with Dryden's version reveals that Chaucer focused on individual human action while Dryden approached the tale through satire of human social conditions. The "human immediacy" of Chaucer's tale may be its outstanding…

Considers the relationships between moral virtue/vice and physical beauty/ugliness in PardPT, focusing on the Old Man and the Pardoner.

Compares Chaucer's manipulation of romance conventions with Carter's postmodern use of romance to challenge rationalist discourse. In its portrayal of mercantile challenge to feudal aristocracy, CT is a medieval modernist text.

Comments briefly on Cecilia of SNT as background to an allusion to her in "Eve of St. Mark" and on the "quaintly Chaucerian lines" in Keats's poem.

Surveys the nature and directness of Boccaccio's influence on English literature from Chaucer to the 1611 Authorized Version of the Bible, with emphasis on style.

Travelling levels status distinctions and puts the pilgrims at the threshold stage in a rite of passage. Their "ritual elder" is the Host; their enterprise, a restructuring of social conventions: love, rank, "gentillesse", vulgarity, and money. …

Considers ParsT in light of Lollard concern with the use of English, the themes and drama of MLE and ParsP, and the inclusion of ParsT in MS Longleat 29. Longleat indicates that lay readers used ParsT for private devotional purposes, although the…

Pitard comments on William of St. Amour's "Tractatus brevis" and assesses SumT as a vernacularized adaptation of it--one in which fraternal pretenses are satirized for their Latinate elitism. The satire occurs because "it is hilarious that the friar…

Argues that the "modes of religious expression" in PrT are "vernacular" insofar as they are simultaneously canny and naïve. Using romance discourse to express religious orthodoxy, the Prioress challenges patriarchal "Latinate institutions," evident…

Lacanian psychoanalysis of how words used to describe the objects of desire in FranT do not accord with the work of desire actually performed.

Examines allegorical, typological, eschatological, and pathetic registers and word play in PhyT, showing how Chaucer thematizes violence and cultural forms that would valorize it. Pitcher compares Chaucer-s rendering with that in the "Roman de la…

Analyzes how Chaucer's rhetorical constructions decenter self-disclosure and resist simplistic notions of gender in WBPT, ClT, FranT, and PhyT. Figurative or allusive speech cannot adequately represent subjectivity and desire. Chaucer's treatments of…

Examines the "interrelation of equivocation and desire" in PhyT, ClT, FranT, and WBPT, not in what the narrators and characters say, but through a "movement or oscillation between opposed interests." In CT, sexual politics can be found in the…

Introductory study guide to PrPT, WBPT, and the accompanying GP descriptions, focusing on the ambiguity of the Prioress and the "moral incoherence" of the Wife of Bath. Includes questions for discussion but no text of the poetry.

Reads MerT as a "striking example" of the "tension between the tale and its teller" insofar as the Merchant fails to understand the "true significance" of the Tale. His "moral perception has been disturbed by anger and by a ludicrous…

Describes several "difficulties" in the close reading of medieval poetry, and then examines complex "interplay between the real and apparent plots" of "Pity," reading the addressee as both a Lady and as an abstract emption, and tracing shifting…

Etymological puns reveal MkT, NPT, and SNT to be a trilogy concerned with the common themes of marriage, sexuality, and decline of the church. The tales dramatize a confrontation among the three pilgrims in which the Priest discloses the Monk's…

Aware of both classical and medieval rhetoric, Chaucer in BD undermines traditions of courtly love by juxtaposing the uncomprehending narrator with the knight, an effete psychic double of the narrator who is unable to accept the fact of death.

Four essays by Pizzorno on Chaucer's epistemological uses of metaphor, exempla, and allegory, with an appendix (pp. 111-31) on figurative thinking in classical and medieval tradition and in modern theory. Chapter one (pp. 5-29) was previously…

Argues that exempla should be regarded as essentially metaphorical rather than didactic, and reads NPT as an exemplary tale that parodies the uses of exempla in the other tales of fragment 7, especially MkT.

PrT develops the concerns with food, gluttony, and filth that are established in the GP description of the Prioress, where she is characterized as childish, greedy, and sinful. The tale of Thopas parodies PrT and restores moral balance.