Browse Items (16472 total)

Parallels various features of CT with late-medieval English social history.

Explores affinities between Roman Catholic doctrine and outlook and Shakespeare's works, especially his romances and other plays that use the "romance mode." Recurrent references to Chaucer reflect his influence on Shakespeare in plot, mode, and…

Richmond studies British and American adaptations of Chaucer's CT for children, from Charles Cowden Clarke's "Tales from Chaucer in Prose" (1833) until World War I. She examines the selections and adaptations of the Tales and the accompanying…

Four historical paintings by Ford Madox Brown (1821-93) exhibit the interplay among literature, art, and religion in Victorian medievalism. Chaucer is the primary focus in The Seeds and Fruits of English Poetry (1845) and Chaucer at the Court of…

The thirty-one portraits in the Kelmscott Chaucer show Burne-Jones's development as a painter and his identification with Chaucer as an artist. Burne-Jones represents Chaucer as a tall and slender man, similar to his own self-portraits. The emotions…

Studies the backgrounds and characteristics of literary laments for the dead and includes a survey of Chaucer's knowledge of and uses of the topos: his reference to Geoffrey Vinsauf's lament for Richard in NPT 7.3347ff., and several brief instances…

Eleven essays on such topics as the theory and techniques of dialect comparison, the texts of Skelton and Dunbar, the N-town manuscript, and specific manuscripts.
For individual essays that pertain to Chaucer, search for Regionalism in Late Medieval…

Contrasts Julian of Norwich's "Revelation of Love" as an "insider's" representation of feminine literary subculture with Chaucer's depictions in PrT and SNT and with materials in the Vernon manuscript. Even Chaucer could not achieve the "inwardness"…

Examines the sexual politics of FranT, arguing that its fundamental ideas of "gentilesse" and "pitee" reflect an aristocratic, masculinist hierarchy. The courtly setting entails this hierarchy, which dominates the tale, but Dorigen's complaint and…

Sets Middle English romances "in the context of late medieval patterns of family and marriage, and presents them as part of a literate but unlearned lay culture centered on the home." Briefly discusses Thop and TC.

Riddy describes the literary accomplishments of Robert Henryson, William Dunbar, and Gavin Douglas as they together "created Older Scots as a literary language." Includes recurrent references to Chaucer and Chaucerianism in the works of these poets.

Impressionistic survey of four Catholic motifs in the CT: the journey of Everyman, fate versus free will, marriage as a sacrament, and the Stoic notion of the "nobleness of man," considering them for the ways that, in Chaucer's presentation, they…

Pedagogical commentary on CT aligned with reader-response theory and affective stylistics.

Two major trends of the past two decades have been the attempt to define the Chaucerian aesthetic and to focus sharply on the poetry itself. Recently, there is a great increase in those critics who read medieval poetry in terms of modern, clinical…

Surveys critical commentary and presents an account of the Friar and FrT. The Friar wants to be deemed a compassionate clergyman, concerned only with correction of sin and perhaps a bit of amusement. But as he moves from his vehement opening tirade…

Ridley views certain aspects of hermeneutic study of Chaucer, in company with certain modes of classical rhetoric, to "help us better to understand both 'how' the poet crafted his poetry and 'why' as a medieval writer he did so."

Chaucerians should welcome the new critical techniques, which will help them determine what it is in the words that causes us to respond as we do. The application of these methods will transcend cultural differences that separate us from Chaucer.

Descriptive rather than interpretative approaches are preferred for Chaucer literary studies, according to Bloomfield, but we need to know "how" the poet constructed his work; thus semantics, the philosophy of speech acts, sociology, etc., are…

Chaucer's enduring appeal derives from his poetry's visuality,its presentation of unchanging human behavior, its deliberate ambiguity. The broad ranges of psychological criticism are viable as long as they are understood as imaginative constructs of…

Assesses Chaucer's methods of drawing audiences into a mutually creative process by confronting them with questions.

Briefly surveys the ways Chaucer leaves "gaps" in CT--omissions, repetitions, reversals, etc.--and suggests how ParsT provides a wholeness despite these gaps.

Surveys critical approaches to PrT, distinguishing between "hard critics" of the Tale who read it as an indictment of the teller's anti-Semitism, and "historical" approaches that consider it in light of late-medieval attitudes and practices. Argues…

Asserts that the label "Scots Chaucerian" clearly does not apply to William Dunbar, documenting the "meagerness of the evidence of Chaucer's influence on him" and demonstrating that Dunbar's poetry is "completely continental" rather than Chaucerian.

Fourteen essays from the seventeenth Sewanee Mediaeval Colloquium, on late-classical and medieval ideas of Nature, science, and human perception. For two essays that pertain to Chaucer, search for Man and Nature in the Middle Ages under Alternative…

Eleven papers by various authors on the literature and history of knighthood, with topics ranging from ascetic knighthood to knighthood as a trope. For two essays that pertain to Chaucer, search for Chivalry, Knighthood, and War in the Middle Ages…