Browse Items (16472 total)

Covenants, a pervasive theme in CT, may bind guest and host, ruler and subject, spouses, kin, or God and humanity. The covenant supports a willingly assumed hierarchy, a model for order; yet these bonds may be reversed.

Documents that compounding was an active process of word formation in Middle English, tabulating Chaucer's compound words and showing that he favored combinations of two Old English nouns rather than combining a noun with another word form or Old…

Comments on discussions of Chaucer's Purse that relate the poem to Lancastrian politics, offering further corroboration that Purse is subversive.

Surveys scholarly discussion of Chaucer's sources for his extrapolatory glosses in Bo, arguing that he was indebted to "some version of the Remigian glosses," to Jean de Meun's "livres de confort," and to a complete version of Nicholas Trevet's…

Psychoanalytic exploration of several unexpected happy outcomes in CT where links between sexual "emergence and abeyance . . . issue in the hope of a beneficent future." MerT "focuses on the Real by way of an impossible suffering of enjoyment through…

Frequently used in ParsT, colloquial anaphora enhances the homiletic style in such repetitious expressions as "Now Comth...," "Look forther...," "Certes...," and "Soothly,...."

Chaucer's punning in ShT is complex, some puns depending upon the eye ("tale," "tallynge") and others upon the ear alone. The Shipman imports into English a foreign form (the fabliau) and foreign (especially French) financial words "that hadden…

Suggests that NPT "reflects . . . the controversy which took place in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries between the secular clergy and the friars." Adduces use of the name "Russell" and several other parallels with French moralized analogues…

Discusses the problematic nature of relating late-medieval nominalism to Chaucer's literary texts. Chaucer's representation of philosophizing clerks suggests that he took a dim view of such figures of contemporary life, whom he tended to portray as…

Surveys Chaucer's seven clerks (Nicholas and Absolon of MilT, John and Aleyn of RvT, the clerk of FranT, Jankyn of WBP, and the Clerk), describing the extent to which the characterizations accord with or echo what is known of "fourteenth-century…

Goodwin explores the practical problems of source study - terminology and the constraints of publication - in relation to ClT. Comments on Boccaccio's and Philippe de Mézières' Griselda stories as "sources of invention" for Chaucer's version.

Bodden reads ClT as Chaucer's deconstruction of the violence of hagiography. Plot and purported allegory clash in the Tale, and Walter is concerned not with Griselda's obedience but with her outward show. Virtue without will is no virtue at all. The…

Mitchell examines the polyvalent meanings of ClT and reflects on the processes of moral deliberation and the polarities that possible meanings represent. The Tale invites us to think hard about the nature of moral thinking.

Examines several medieval notions of testing and promise-making, arguing that in ClT the Clerk makes fun of naive "essentialist" allegory. Haines reads wit and sarcasm in Griselda's tone at the "portentous" line 666 and suggests that this tone helps…

The Clerk and T. S. Eliot's title character in "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" share intellectual interests. In addition, both are "caught" between the external and the internal, both are reluctant to speak, and both speak allusively.

The Clerk's dismissal of Petrarch's opening "descriptio" is ironic--for the "king of rivers" would be understood by knowledgeable pilgrims to signify rhetorical powers and divine wisdom. In fact, the Clerk deploys a full range of rhetorical figures…

Bakhtinian approach to the sketch of the Clerk: there is an intricate dialogue between the latter and the narrator. The facts behind the story and the way it is told reveal much about Chaucer's complex personality.

Reads details of ClT as evidence of the Ckerk's pedagogical skills in his efforts to instruct the Wife of Bath and others.

Treats the theme of "gentilesse" in ClT as a response to its presence in WBT, arguing that it helps to characterize the Clerk, underlies Walter's decisions, and encouraged Chaucer to choose "precisely this legend for exactly this spot" in CT.…

Posits that John of Salisbury's "Policraticus" is the source of the closing comment of the GP description of the Clerk (GP 1.308); "gladly wolde he lerne and gladly teche."

Traces the legacy of gladly learning and gladly teaching, from Plato's "Timaeus" in Chalcidius's translation through Jean de Meun's "Roman de la Rose" to the GP description of the Clerk (1.308), also noting the presence of the legacy in the…

Analyzes clerical speech habits in Chaucer's GP "ars descriptionis personae"; affective tone in PrT, SNP, SNT, MkT, and ClT; and, where appropriate, the connection with the stately rhyme-royal stanza--with contrasts to language, verse styles, and…

In PrT, uncanniness and the eventual wounding of the clergeon are necessary to render the clergeon holy and Christlike. His experience is close to that represented in miracle plays exploring the Slaughter of the Innocents.

Draws on Scog to try to establish a picture of Scogan himself. Scogan is the subject of the article rather than Chaucer.

The poems to Scogan, Bukton, and Vache, and those to Richard II and Henry IV provide evidence of the makeup of the audience, with whom the poet shared an interest in good manners and good humor.