Norris tallies and assesses the major and minor sources of Malory's "Morte Darthur," suggesting that Malory was more widely read than is usually assumed. Chaucer's influence (especially WBT, FranT, and KnT) is neither close nor sustained in plot,…
Explores literary allusions used in the courts of law in Britain and Ireland, revealing how literature conceptually informs practical life. Osborough briefly mentions Chaucer when discussing etymology in a nineteenth-century case involving…
Hoccleve's authorial identity develops through "borrowings and echoes" derived from TC: "Boethian dialogue; diseased language; and gendered subjects." These allusions work as conjurings--understood as both invocation and exorcism--of the "spectral…
Building on medieval "gender comedies," including Chaucer's (especially WBP and the fabliaux), Lydgate anticipates the family-state analogy that pervades early modern political theory. By giving the complaints of abused husbands a court hearing, the…
Burrow, J. A.
Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
Burrow explores the functions and rhetoric of praise in classical, medieval, and Renaissance poetry, with commentary on its relative paucity in modern tradition. Focuses on medieval English panegyric verse, love poetry, and devotional poetry, with…
Cole contends that metrical groupings of works from the "Alliterative Revival" are faulty and that these groupings reflect inappropriate application of phonology common in the "poetic dialects" of Chaucer and Gower.
Duffell, Martin J.
Language and Literature 17 (2008): 5-20.
Provides statistical analysis of 300-line samples from the verse of eight poets who wrote in English (Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Longfellow, and Browning), comparing percentages of inversion and "erosion" among iambic…
Holton, Amanda.
Aldershot, Hampshire; and Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2008.
Studies Chaucer's stylistic techniques, comparing several texts (KnT, MLT, PhyT, MkT, ManT, and LGW) with sources to show that Chaucer employed a style that was remarkably consistent across genres, rather than appropriating the styles of source…
Benson, C. David.
Stephen J. Harris and Bryon L. Grigsby, eds. Misconceptions About the Middle Ages. Routledge Studies in Medieval Religion and Culture, no. 7 (New York: Routledge, 2008), pp. 240-53.
Benson advocates teaching Chaucer in Middle English, because the liveliness and vitality of Chaucer's language are lost in translation.
Considine, John.
Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
Surveys the making of English, German, Latin, and Greek dictionaries from 1500 to 1650, including the contributions of Franciscus Junius (among others). Discusses the unpublished manuscript of Junius's glossary to Chaucer and the place of Chaucer's…
Hsy explores the use of English, French, and Latin by writers such as Chaucer, Gower, and Margery Kempe in conjunction with the polyglot mercantile culture of London. Argues that these writers "hybridize" multilingual traditions to form "hybrid …
Analysis of Bo, Mel, and ParsT reveals that preverbal "ne" unsupported by a postverbal "not" appears most often with "forms of be, will, and witen"; moreover, this construction is more likely to appear in subordinate clauses than in main clauses.
Jucker, Andreas H.
Richard Dury et al., eds. English Historical Linguistics 2006: Selected Papers from the Fourteenth International Conference on English Historical Linguistics (ICEHL 14), Bergamo, 21- 25 August 2006. Volume II: Lexical and Semantic Change. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2008, pp. 3-29.
Arguing that contemporary "negative" politeness may function in public only, Jucker surveys historical functions of politeness in English. Analyzes Chaucer's use of "thou" and "you" forms in ClT as "retractable," i.e., variable by situation, rapidly…
Miura, Ayumi
Masachiyo Amano, Michiko Ogura, and Masayuki Ohkado, eds. Historical Englishes in Varieties of Texts and Contexts: The Global COE Programme, International Conference 2007 (New York and Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2008), pp. 187-200.
Identifies and tabulates "new" impersonal verbs used by Chaucer, Gower, Langland, and the Gawain-poet, describing factors that affected their usage, especially imitation of Old French forms.
Momma, Haruko, and Michael Matto, eds.
Malden, Mass.; and Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008.
Fifty-nine essays by various authors on topics ranging from the Indo-European roots of English to linguistic theory of the twenty-first century, from "the history of the history of English" to various geographical Englishes, and from English…
Molencki, Rafał.
Masachiyo Amano, Michiko Ogura, and Masayuki Ohkado, eds. Historical Englishes in Varieties of Texts and Contexts: The Global COE Programme, International Conference 2007 (New York and Frankfurt am Main, 2008), pp. 201-15.
Discusses the "sudden emergence" of and rapid growth in use of the "adverbial subordinator" because in Middle English writing, including the works of Chaucer.
Amano, Masachiyo, and others, eds.
New York and Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2008.
Twenty-eight essays by various authors on linguistic aspects of Old and Middle English. For three that pertain to Chaucer; search for Historical Englishes in Varieties of Texts and Contexts under Alternative Title.
Looks at flattery "as a practice" (for communicating with superiors) and "as a discourse" (the conventional railings against the practice) in a variety of Middle English texts. Chapter 3 examines Mel, MerT, and NPT as "conjunctions of flattery and …
Sauer, Hans.
Masachiyo Amano, Michiko Ogura, and Masayuki Ohkado, eds. Historical Englishes in Varieties of Texts and Contexts: The Global COE Programme, International Conference 2007 (New York and Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2008), pp. 387-403.
Surveys the structure, frequency, and functions of interjections in the English language, tracing discussion of this word class in linguistic commentary and in Beowulf, MilT, and modern comic books.
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…
Pakkala-Weckström, Mari.
Andreas H. Jucker and Irma Taavitsainen, eds. Speech Acts in the History of English (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2008), pp. 133-62.
Pakkala-Weckström examines the speech act of promising and the special conditions needed to constitute a binding promise in Middle English, drawing examples from several of Chaucer's works: FranT, ClT, WBT, TC, FrT, and ShT. Certain formulaic words…
Bloom, Harold, ed. [Cornelius, Michael G., vol. ed.]
New York: Infobase, 2008.
An anthology of eighty-three responses to Chaucer and his works excerpted from commentaries written from the fourteenth through the twentieth centuries: fourteenth (2), fifteenth (9), sixteenth (20), seventeenth (4), eighteenth (10), nineteenth (35),…
Bliss, Jane.
Rochester, N.Y.; and Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2008.
Bliss surveys the variety of ways that names, naming, and namelessness in romance "contribute to our understanding" of the genre, focusing on Middle English narratives but also discussing French and Anglo-Norman analogues. She identifies a number…
