Browse Items (16472 total)

Describes factors involved in English language spatio-temporal systems, i.e., the uses of pronouns, demonstratives, adverbs, verb tenses, and modals that indicate proximity and distance between speakers in space and time. Draws evidence from Astr and…

Explores poetic speech acts (following the lead of J. L. Austin), treating Chaucer's dedication of his book in TC 5.1856-62 as an exemplary type of performative speech act--"the Chaucer-Type"--characterized by having three explicit constitutive…

Defines kinds of rhyme by their varying degrees of "richness," from "simple rhymes" to "triple rhymes" (in which three successive terminal syllables rhyme).

In medieval tradition, sodomy was associated with misinterpretation. When seen in this light, Absolon's sodomizing of Nicholas in MilT both reinforces heteronormativity and decries the system upon which it is based. The Miller's reference to "Goddes…

Surveys attempts to explain how MkT is appropriate to the Monk as teller, and cites examples from monastic preaching of associations of "the monastic profession and an interest in historical examples of misfortune."

Includes commentary (pp. 16-18) on the "entrances" of Chanticleer and Russell into NPT, suggesting parallels between features of the Tale and the staging of a play.

Textbook edition of TC, conservatively edited from Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 61, with modern punctuation, sidebar glosses and bottom-of-page notes, an index of characters, a glossary of common words and phrases, and a select bibliography.…

Examines "the importance of ritual in the Victorian reception of the medieval past," including discussion of TC.

Recurrently linked with the neo-Platonic notion of the harmony of the spheres, the dream-vision motif of the celestial journey recurs in works by Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, and Dryden.

Despite the apparent clash between comedy and moral allegory, writers from Chaucer to Spenser combine the two, a fusion rooted in 'La Roman de la Rose.' Treats BD and HF as well as works by Gower, Dunbar, Skelton, and Spenser.

Explores the "sense of guilt and uncertainty about the value of creative literature" in Chaucer's works, particularly as it generates "expansive, questioning poetics" in HF and "problematises the principle of allegory" in the final fragments of CT,…

Examines the themes of prophecy and retold narrative in premodern works about Troy by Virgil, Dares and Dictys, Chaucer (TC), Lydgate, and Shakespeare, arguing that, in various ways, they "call into question the efficacy of poetry and of knowledge,…

Addresses the "challenge posed to Christian ethics due to the proliferation of urban markets and increased personal wealth in medieval England," examining various aspects of avarice in "Piers Plowman"; John Gower's "Confessio Amantis"; and CT,…

Assesses the opposition between idealized women and overt antifeminism in Christianity, Neoplatonism, and western literary tradition, using it as background to argue that Chaucer maintained in CT a successful "tension of opposing viewpoints," even…

Summarizes traditions antecedent to Chaucer's uses of classical deities, and asserts that Chaucer's own uses rejuvenate the tradition, arguing that he is less conventional than usually assumed. Treats sources and analogues, BD, HF, PF, TC, LGWP, KnT,…

Proposes that Chaucer, Gower, Lydgate, and other contemporaries may have viewed Ovid's work not merely as a source of exempla, but as a rhetorical model for subversive stories.

Argues that a variety of "fourteenth- and fifteenth-century recovery romances create a convergent set of fantasies that reflect desires both for the reclamation of the Holy Land and for the protection and ascendance of Christianity." Chapter four…

Argues that 'Augustine's theology allows us to see providence in romance as a doubled perspective that recognizes the existential smallness of individuals and their collective participatory power in a plural world," addressing KnT, ClT, and…

Medieval universities taught "perspectiva," or optics, important in literary realism. Chaucer's use of light, vision, and space parallels passages in optical texts and becomes thematic in CT, fragments G and A. Jean de Meun, Dante, and Boccaccio…

In response to Gower's words to Chaucer at the end of "Confessio Amantis" (8.2941-57), Chaucer first revised LGWP and then completely restructured the plan for CT (e.g., taking Mel away from the Man of Law and giving him a "Gower" tale instead).

S]urveys manuscripts excerpting Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales," Rolle's "Commentary on the Song of Songs," Lydgate's "Fall of Princes," and Gower's
"Confessio amantis' . . . [showing how] [t]hese manuscripts display a fifteenth-century attitude to…

Identifies a "dichotomy of fascination and revulsion towards Troy" in several Middle English narratives, and argues that in TC and Henryson's "Testament of Cresseid," Criseyde "signifies the repeated theme of loss and treachery inherent in the…

Argues that "late medieval poets envisioned the environment as a participant in the production of poetry," reading HF for the ways that it represents "creativity born within the whirl of the Aristotelian world of fluctuation." Also assesses…

Argues that the "use of ill bodies in storytelling acts as a virus" so that, when familiar narratives are retold, "the image of ailing bodies will spread to future versions," often mutating. Links lovesickness in TC to leprosy in Henryson's…

Explores confession and intention ("entente") in selected works of Chaucer: TC, LGWP, FrT, PardT, ParsT, and Ret, reading them as a "progression" that "resembles the evolution of penitential concepts across the whole of the medieval period." Assesses…