Exemplified by those of Carolyn Dinshaw and Elaine Tuttle Hansen, feminist critiques of E. Talbot Donaldson's scholarship are curiously similar to D. W. Robertson's critiques of that scholarship. These critiques find fault in its subjectivity and…
Warren, Michelle R.
Paul Strohm, ed. Middle English (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 51-67.
Warren challenges the notion that translations are worth less than their "originals," arguing that each work is a particular cultural manifestation. She treats Chaucer as the "text-book case of an 'author-translator'" (in contrast with Henry…
The essays in ChauR 41.3 explore Donaldson's accomplishments in "his guises as editor, philologist, and New Critic" and the continued relevance of that work in the early twenty-first century.
Williams, David.
Naples: Fla.: Sapientia Press of Ave Maria University, 2007.
Chaucer is a philosophical realist whose naïve narrators, tale-within-a-tale structuring, and focus on irony and linguistic slippage enable him to assert Truth while exposing the limitations of individual human perspectives. Williams examines the…
Zeeman, Nicolette.
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 29 (2007): 141-82.
Male singers in Chaucer's works recurrently--perhaps inevitably--embody narcissism and receive "brutal," scatological punishment as a result of their deserved, comic victimhood. Psychoanalytic understanding of love as "affect" and of song as…
An introduction to CT designed for student use, with questions for discussion, research suggestions, and a review at the end of several topical sections: (1) biography and socioliterary setting; (2) language, style, and form; (3) reading CT; (4)…
Bahr, Arthur William.
Dissertation Abstracts International A68.02 (2007): n.p.
Bahr explores parallels between manuscripts as compilations and groups of people as affinities in late medieval London. Chaucer in CT and Gower in Confessio Amantis differ in how they conceive of literary and social organization.
Blandeau, Agnès.
Martine Yvernault and Sophie Cassagnes-Brouquet, eds. Frères et sœurs: Les liens adelphiques dans l'Occident antique et médiéval. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2007, pp. 229-36.
Blandeau examines meanings and connotations of the terms "brother," "brotherly," and "brotherhood" in CT and other medieval texts, from "Beowulf" to Malory's "Le Morte Darthur." Brotherhood ranges widely and can extend to a universal fraternity in a…
Late fourteenth-century traders' time of profit-making synchronizes with narrative time in Chaucer's tales, enabling the poet to articulate the relationship between time as physically experienced and Christian time, both linear and cyclical.
Bowen considers the treatment of stringed instruments in Chaucer's Latin sources, their treatment as symbols of "celebration and peace" for characters in CT, and connections between the instruments and concepts of bodies. Stringed instruments…
Dixon, Chris Jennings, ed.
Urbana, Ill.: National Council of Teachers of English, 2007.
Seventy-five lesson plans for teaching writing to high school students, arranged in seven categories: Writing Process, Portfolios, Literature, Research, Grammar, Writing on Demand, and Media. Two of the plans for writing about literature focus on…
Greenwood, Maria.
Colette Stévanovitch, ed. L'articulation langue-littérature dans les textes médiévaux anglais, IV. Actes des journées d'etude de juin 2005 et juin 2007 à l'Université de Nancy. Publications de l'Association des Médiévistes Anglicistes de l'Enseignement Supérieur. Collection GRENDEL, no. 9 (Nancy: AMAES, 2007), pp. 125-34.
Greenwood studies types of friendship, plus the positive and negative values attached to friendship, in FranT, MerT, and Mel.
Knapp, Peggy A.
Gail Ashton and Louise Sylvester, eds. Teaching Chaucer (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 17-29.
Uses theoretical perspectives from Raymond Williams, Emmanuel Kant, and Hans-Georg Gadamer to explain and justify a pedagogical approach to CT based on student pursuit of individual "keywords" in the text and students' selection of a single pilgrim…
Kruger, Steven F.
Gail Ashton and Louise Sylvester, eds. Teaching Chaucer (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 30-45.
Pedagogical approach to CT combining traditional "high-stakes" formal writing and "low-stakes" informal writing, incorporated in a broader portfolio of student responses and projects.
Chaucer reconceptualized CT in response to a challenge levied in Gower's "Confessio Amantis." Shaping the Wife of Bath and the Pardoner to embody the Seven Deadly Sins, Chaucer responded to Gower's taxonomy in the "Confessio" and, in doing so,…
Examines food imagery in MilT, RvT, CkT, and GP. These portions of CT threaten, but do not quite achieve, the collapse of Lévi-Strauss's "culinary triangle."
The "structural features" of GP reflect "the medieval philosophical debate over universals" and the epistemology of the "via moderna." Chaucer's number and arrangement of pilgrims suggest the "inadequacy of categories," whereas the balanced…
Miller, Mark.
Peter Brown, ed. A Companion to Medieval English Literature and Culture, c.1350-c.1500 (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2007), pp. 554-69.
Miller presents CT as a series of case studies on how social and ideological formulations shape subjectivities. He focuses on "aristocratic formalism" in KnT, sexuality and commodification in WBP, and notions of ethical perfection and moral purity in…
Discusses CT, especially WBP, in a study of the construction of the "self" in the late medieval and early modern periods. Focuses on how a complex sense of the self is constructed in "The Book of Margery Kempe" and developed into the seventeenth…
Patterson, Lee, ed.
New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.
Ten previously published essays or excerpts from longer works by various authors, with an introduction and a brief bibliography of suggested readings. Topics include GP and estates literature (Jill Mann); design and chaos in KnT (Robert W. Hanning);…
Describes a pedagogical experiment featuring a mock trial of Chaucer--asking students to prosecute and defend Chaucer on the charge of perpetrating medieval antifeminism through his characterization of women in CT and TC.
Sandidge, Marilyn.
Albrecht Classen, ed. Old Age in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: Interdisciplinary Approaches to a Neglected Topic. (New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2007), pp. 357-73.
Youthful attitudes toward old age in the works of Boccaccio and Chaucer differ strikingly, perhaps because of demographic changes caused by the Black Plague. In Boccaccio, youth respects the wisdom of age, whereas in Chaucer young people resent the…
Surveys 115 books threatened with censorship in the United States because of objections to their social (rather than political, religious, or sexual) depictions. Arranged alphabetically by title of the work, each entry includes a plot summary, a…
Watson, Nicholas.
Andrew Hass, David Jasper, and Elisabeth Jay, eds. The Oxford Handbook of English Literature and Theology (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 363-81.
Watson summarizes the theocentrism of the late Middle Ages, examines Langland's critique of formal theology in "Piers Plowman," and discusses how CT disclaims theological authority in exploring truth and moral utility. Argues that Mel may be the…
