Browse Items (16472 total)

Item not seen; the single WorldCat record states that this is a filmstrip for children, with "Photographs of original pictures and the English countryside [that] illustrate life in the Middle Ages in England."

Chapter 4 of a social history of London, with emphasis on the plague, the status of the Church, the vivid characterizations of CT as a "window on the world . . . in all its richness," and Richard Whittington's mayoralty. Also published in The City on…

A short introduction to Chaucer's England, his contemporaries, his life, and his literary career. In Japanese with English abstract.

Anatomizes Middle English poetry, with fourteen essays by various authors on various literary topics (one on architecture by Nikolaus Pevsner), selections from Middle English verse, brief lives of the writers, suggestions for further readings, and a…

Examines CT within the social and political life of the later fourteenth century. Chaucer had an unusually assimilative, syncretic, and integrative imagination, but he lived at a time of disintegrating social and religious forms and values. He was…

Offers evidence that Troilus is "extremely young" in TC, comparing details from Boccaccio's "Filostrato" and other analogues.

Deals with medieval systems of dividing life into ages, with ages based on time divisions, and with exhortations to overcome the difficulties of various ages and to act one's age. Discusses the GP Squire as a youth, the Wife of Bath's youth, old…

Comments on the ambiguities and implications of the ages of the protagonists in TC, considering evidence that indicates Troilus is "twenty or less," Criseyde, "several years older," and Pandarus, a "middle-aged trendy."

PF and "Love's Labours Lost" develop similar relations between lyrics and poetic or dramatic narratives. Shakespeare emulated Chaucer's movement from narrative to song--a psychoanalytic release from courtly or social constraint into "cosmic,…

The twelfth-century alba genre offered a more flexible paradigm for gender roles than critics have realized, a flexibility that Chaucer, in his appropriation of the alba in TC, continues and capitalizes on as he highlights the lovers' differences in…

Surveys the figure of the alchemist and the uses of alchemical imagery in western literature, focusing on how satire and trivialization of the subject gave way to more esoteric uses, especially as the practice of alchemy gave way to chemistry.…

Anatomizes the theme and structures of failure in CYPT, contrasting the Canon's Yeoman and Chaucer-pilgrim as narrators, and tallying ways that failure dominates the narrative: failed science, failed rhetoric, failed comedy, failed moralizing, and…

Collette offers Umberto Eco's notion of a "rhizome labyrinth's indefinite structure" as a heuristic tool for describing the relationship of a text to its "cultural matrix" rather than to specific sources. Focuses on CYT.

"Zephirus" and "licour" are not merely stylistic adornment but referential as well. The words evoke alchemical change and purification, themes that run through many of the tales and conclude the collection in ParsT with spiritual rebirth.

Protagonist and narrative are usually aligned in medieval literature, but the protagonist is alienated from the narrative when his or her ethos conflicts with generic context, as in Chaucer's TC and CYT and in works of Malory and Hoccleve, among…

Uses Chaucer, Spenser, Homer, Virgil, and Bunyan as test specimens in the presentation of allegory as a vision of superimposed frames of reference.

The allegory of ParsPT assumes that literature can somehow represent truth, while the theology of ParsPT emphasizes the impossibility of humanity's comprehending such truth. Ret espouses a mediating negative allegory that indicates divine…

Reads Mel as a "moral allegory," identifying where (in relative degrees) Chaucer and his sources encourage peaceable Christian humility and reliance upon on God's aid rather than self-assertive militancy in resisting the world, the flesh, and the…

Claims that William Dunbar's debt to Chaucer (WBPT) in his "Tua Meriit Wemen and the Wedo, "although "important and considerable, is often exaggerated beyond helpfulness." The poem owes a great deal to earlier alliterative poetry, in particular…

The large amount of alliteration in narrative and lyric poetry of the courtly tradition, including Chaucer's poetry, is derived from certain veins of devotional prose of the thirteenth century.

Manuscript evidence indicates that only after Chaucer's death did editors assemble copies of individual tales and links to arrange the fragments (reflecting various stages of development in Chaucer's plan) into their differing ideas of a coherent…

Examines the "highly contrived" allegory of Hans Holbein's painting, "The Ambassadors" (1533), assessing its religious theme as conveyed through evocations of "astronomy and geometry, optics and various occult arts." Also argues that the painting…

Nakao assesses the use of "as she that" as it is applied to Criseyde, identifying the unusually high frequency of the phrase in TC, its various functions and semantic range, and the way that Chaucer exploits this variety "to hold in balance his…

Investigates various characterizations of Greeks in Old French and Middle English, including that of Diomede in TC, a depiction "informed by classical ideas and Chaucer's depictions of Jews and Saracens in other works." Troilus, in contrast, is…

Adjustments to the traditional narrative in ClT compel us to read Walter, Griselda, and the "peple" as complex characters, rich in ambiguity, in a setting that "moves between an ideal and real world" (27). These complications enrich the simple…