Argues that Chaucer uses rhyme words in the ballade form (Ros, Ven, For, Purse, Sted, Gent, Wom Nob, Buk, Scog, Truth, Wom Unc) for stylistic effects, not because of linguistic limitation. As a translator, Chaucer employs several methods of…
Lydgate was not an incompetent Chaucerian imitator; he used a different verse design. Parametric comparison of Chaucer's and Lydgate's verse designs demonstrates Lydgate's use of a tradition older than Chaucer's iambic pentameter. Lydgate had only…
Over six centuries, Chaucer's verse has been construed in a "bewildering variety of ways." This essay surveys the reception of Chaucer's metrics from his immediate contemporaries to the present and considers the process of "transmitting metrical…
Scholars continue to reflect on whether particular readings of CT are authorial revisions or scribal editing and on what Chaucer's plans for the work might have been. Understanding manuscript relationships for any particular tale can help set the…
The dreamer's experience in BD is an amplification of the Ceyx and Alceone story. The Black Knight and the dreamer may be seen as the same person, the dream providing a means of facing the fact of death.
Explores Criseyde's "Boethian pragmatism" and her agency in TC, considering how they conflict with social gender-based social constraints and the constraints of the romance genre. The "incompatibility of Boethian philosophy and the romance genre…
Forni lauds the BBC's modernized television adaptation of CT (2003) for its appeal to a wide audience while retaining fidelity to the original texts; for its intertextuality; and for its highlighting of aspects of Chaucer that appeal to contemporary…
Addresses word choice in Thomas Hoccleve's English translation of Henry Suso's "Ars moriendi," a Latin text. Chaucer's use of the word "similitude" shows that it had entered the English language; however, Hoccleve translates both imago" and…
Matthews responds to articles about Brian Helgeland's film A Knight's Tale, suggesting that medieval studies should be open to medievalism studies, rather than placing the fields in opposition.
Suggests that Chaucer's TC influenced Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet" before serving as the source of the playwright's "Troilus and Cressida." Shakespeare explores ways to respond to source material in the two works. His "Troilus," in particular,…
Dell contends that Brian Helgeland's film A Knight's Tale offers an alternative to capitalistic perpetual accomplishment, the model of desire that critics associate with the film. This alternative is courtly love, a paradigm drawn from the Lancelot…
D'Arcens addresses Helgeland's film as an entry point for deconstructing medievalist studies. Such studies, she suggests, reflect a latent Platonism that regards the Middle Ages as a stable standard against which to measure texts and contemporary…
Trigg identifies two conflicting motivations for the making of Brian Helgeland's film "A Knight's Tale": the desire for academic research to provide legitimacy and the desire to create a new fictional narrative to engage a contemporary audience. This…
Chaucer's improvements result from adapting source to the framework of CT--giving the tale to the highly individualized Reeve, whose emphasis upon "quitting" the Miller requires that Symkin become the strongest character in the tale. The most…
Identifies the "broad patterns of ideology in the text," discusses sources and onomastics, and examines the way in which the poetic working out energizes and modifies the ideology.
Of the interpretative constructs posited in the act of reading, none is more persistent than the author. In CT, GP, PF, and NPT, Walker examines author postulation to explain Chaucer's "tolerance" and "broad-minded humanity."
Chaucer's changes from Boccaccio's 'Il Filostrato' in the swoon scenes develop the characterization of the three participants, adding comedy and reflecting medical treatments of the swoon.
Describes how Chaucer and John Gower appear as two poets/storytellers in "Greenes Vision" (1592), offering "authorization and legitimization" to Robert Greene's work "within a specifically English tradition," colored by "ambivalent nostalgia for an…
The style of PF weights the syntagmatic axis of discourse, whereas "Pearl" weights the paradigmatic axis. This difference is revealed in the way each poem treats lexical innovation, the relation between syntax and verse form, and the relation…
One should not apply a naturalistic test to ClT, which displays the traditional characteristics of the parable--an illustrative story directed to a single point. The point here is that Griselda is true to God, which is a sufficient principle of life…
Chaucer refers to popular uprisings in the Monk's legend of Nero and in NPT. Jack Straw was a title used in springtime games in England, and the rebellion he reputedly led may have stemmed largely from popular ritual.
Applies Joseph Frank's theory of "spatial form" in the modern novel (forms in which meaning is created through simultaneity and juxtaposition rather than through linearity and causation) to BD, PF, and HF. Examines particularly the use of myth (Seys…
Chancery highlighted problems posed in the medieval common law courts by failures in jurisprudence. MLT raises questions about injustice that reflect critically on the Sergeant of Law. Though he is shown to be an expert in jurisprudence, he is…
