Robertson, D. W.,Jr.
Mediaevalia 6 (1980): 239-59.
Aware of the ethics of "commune profit," Chaucer condemns the self-seeking Franklin, Miller, Reeve, and Wife of Bath, while commending the other-centered Parson and Plowman.
Robertson, D. W.,Jr.
John P. Hermann and John J. Burke, eds. Signs and Symbols in Chaucer's Poetry (University: University of Alabama Press, 1981), pp. 11-26.
Concerned with the practical and beneficial impact of his work, Chaucer drew figurative language from everyday sources, e.g., the visual arts. Knowledge of these sheds light on GP, WBT, and RvT.
Robertson, D. W.,Jr.
Chaucer Review 14 (1980): 403-20.
Land tenure laws and cloth industry figures suggest that the Wife was a bondswoman with holdings in the industry acquired from her first husband and used to attract four more and to finance expensive pilgrimages. A bondswoman character is also…
In addition to etymologically undetermined words in Chaucer and to words whose ironic use obscures their true meaning, Chaucer's portrayal of characters (e.g., Reeve, Plowman, Yeoman, the widow of NPT, Griselda, and Symkyn in RvT) reveals that he was…
Robertson, D. W.,Jr.
Beryl Rowland, ed. Companion to Chaucer Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), pp. 403-13.
Earlier critics, led by Kittredge, read the poem as a consolation for John of Gaunt, embodied as the Black Knight;the dreamer is naive and childish. Recently, however, Robertson has denied the view of "courtly love" some see in the work. Instead,…
Robertson, Elizabeth Ann.
Literature Compass 5.3 (2008): 505-28.
Summarizes Aristotelian affiliations of women with matter (rather than form) and, following Bourdieu, explores how this affiliation and its "practices" are enacted in Middle English literature. Chaucer engages "contemporary historical practices about…
Robertson, Elizabeth, and Christine M. Rose, eds.
New York and Basingstoke : Palgrave, 2001.
Eleven essays about literary depictions of rape in Chaucer, Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, Latin comedies, Ovidian narratives, and the Philomel story. Includes an introduction by the editors, an afterword by Christopher Cannon, and a revised reprint…
Robertson, Elizabeth, ed.
C. David Benson and Elizabeth Robertson, eds. Chaucer's Religious Tales (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1990), pp. 145-60.
Robertson encourages feminist critics to confront "the complexities of the relationship between women and religion" in Chaucer's religious tales, for "what appear in these tales to be extremes of female suffering and violence against women are…
Robertson, Elizabeth.
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 23: 143-80, 2001.
Through various alignments of Muslim and Christian characters and transgressions of social and gender boundaries, Chaucer "defamiliarizes" essentialist categories of race, class, gender, and especially religion in MLT. In particular, Chaucer depicts…
Robertson, Elizabeth.
Elizabeth Robertson and Christine M. Rose, eds. Representing Rape in Medieval and Early Modern Literature (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 281-310.
Examines "the role rape plays in the formation of Criseyde's character," contrasting Criseyde with Helen of Troy and Lucretia. Criseyde is a "choosing subject," and the language of rape helps to define the ambiguities of choice she faces.
Robertson, Elizabeth.
Wendy Harding, ed. Drama, Narrative and Poetry in The Canterbury Tales (Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Mirail, 2003), pp. 175-93.
Robertson considers KnT, WBT, and FranT in the light of contemporary marital law, Christian doctrine, and the question of mutual consent to marriage. Chaucer's profound interest in the legitimacy of the female subject is a subset of his larger…
Robertson, Elizabeth.
Sharon Farmer and Carol Braun Pasternack, eds. Gender and Difference in the Middle Ages. Medieval Cultures, no. 32 (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), pp. 322-51.
A revised version of the author's essay, "The 'Elvyssh' Power of Constance: Christian Feminism in Geoffrey Chaucer's The Man of Law's Tale" (SAC 23 [2001], pp. 143-80).
Robertson, Elizabeth.
Robert M. Stein and Sandra Pierson Prior, eds. Reading Medieval Culture: Essays in Honor of Robert W. Hanning (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), pp. 302-23.
The representations of rape (sexual assault and abduction) in WBT and "Kingis Quair" invite consideration of free will and agency as part of a critique of late medieval social formulations of male/female relationships. In WBT, Chaucer indicts…
Robertson, Elizabeth.
English Language Notes 44.1 (2006): 77-79.
Robertson introduces a series of seven essays responding to Nicholas Watson's Speculum essay "Censorship and Cultural Change in Medieval England: Vernacular Theology, the Oxford Translation Debate, and Arundel's Constitutions of 1409" (Speculum 70…
Robertson, Elizabeth.
Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 26 (2007): 67-79.
Includes recurrent attention to Chaucer studies, while exploring the history of feminism in medieval studies and the need for a "dialectical questioning" between concerns of particular historical women and their more general contexts.
Argues that SNT "presents conversion as a choice stimulated by apprehension of the divine through the senses" and accomplished by a "radical act of the will, unmediated and immediate, if not inherently violent."
Robertson, Elizabeth.
Bettina Bildhauer and Chris Jones, eds. The Middle Ages in the Modern World: Twenty-First Century Perspectives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 219-38.
Examines Chaucer's impact on medievalisms of early and later Romantic English poets. Portrays Chaucer's influence on Wordsworth, not only in deliberately medievalist work, but throughout his corpus, focusing on daisies and their presentations in text…
Robertson, Elizabeth.
Helen M. Hickey, Anne McKendry, and Melissa Raine, eds. Contemporary Chaucer across the Centuries (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018), pp. 25-41.
Assesses Troilus's and Criseyde's first looks at one another in TC as examples of physiological sense perception, rather than as mental or emotional processes or stages. Resists feminist and patristic readings of these gazes, and reads them in light…
Robertson, Elizabeth.
Julia Boffey and Christiania Whitehead, eds. Middle English Lyrics: New Readings of Short Poems (Cambridge: Brewer, 2018), pp. 174-88.
Argues that three lyric moments in Book II of TC (Antigone's song, the lay of the nightingale, and the dream of the eagle) "distil the complexity of Criseyde's
inner deliberations," show "how Criseyde's choice to love is inflected by the condition…
Robertson, Elizabeth.
Ad Putter and Judith A. Jefferson, eds. The Transmission of Medieval Romance: Metres, Manuscripts and Early Prints (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2018), pp. 50-68.
Argues that rhyme royal was rarely used in Middle English romances because it "mitigates against some of the aims and purposes" of the genre, creating "a self-consciousness about temporality that presses against the fairy-tale temporality of romance"…
Robertson, Kellie Paige.
Dissertation Abstracts International 58 (1998): 4645A.
Explores conflicts between theories and practice of translation from Geoffrey of Monmouth to Thomas Hoccleve, focusing on how Lollard debates about translation provoked orthodox claims that the vernacular was "pestilential."
Describes Chaucer responsibilities as a justice of the peace from 1385 to 1389, particularly "the enforcement of highly controversial labor regulations," and explores how the "trope of poet as accused laborer" in LGWP suggests his concerns about such…
Robertson, Kellie.
New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
Five chapters explore the "effects of labor laws" on vernacular writing in late medieval England: chronicles, anonymous dream visions, LGW, the Paston letters, and morality plays. Robertson focuses on interactions between theories of labor and…
Robertson, Kellie.
Paul Strohm, ed. Middle English (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 441-58.
Robertson explores effects of the English labor laws of 1349 on attitudes toward writing, surveying reactions by various writers and using Chaucer's GP "as a lens through which to view the critical stakes in thinking about" work--particularly the…
