Sanok, Catherine.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007.
Discusses the creation of female audiences, examining LGW and other works (including WBT) to explore how saints' lives shaped literary history, thus making women "visible participants" in vernacular literary culture. Alceste is a metonym for a…
Echard, Siân.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008.
Echard studies the "postmedieval life of medieval texts" as they are embodied in material form, exploring strategies for representing the authenticity of the texts and for reimagining them for new audiences. The book includes chapters on design…
Stanbury, Sarah.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008.
Stanbury describes late medieval English attitudes toward images, icons, and devotion, exploring how the tensions among these attitudes are represented in art and literature. Reformist distrust of images co-existed with newly intensified devotional…
Minnis, Alastair.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008.
Studies the Pardoner's and Wife of Bath's "deviancy" in light of late medieval theological and academic discourses, particularly the commentaries and summas of the scholastics, Lollard treatises ,and reactions to Lollard writings and trials. Neither…
Crane, Susan.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013.
Deconstructs the human/animal binary once useful in the emerging field of animal studies by casting anew these relationships into a "multiplicity of intersecting and competing distinctions that better reflect medieval ways of thinking." Through close…
Prendergast, Thomas A.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015.
Studies the significance of "Poets' Corner" in Westminster Abbey as both a physical and a metaphorical literary space. Presents the history of Chaucer's importance as the "founding corpse of Poets' Corner" in discussion of how "political, moral, and…
Ingham, Patricia Clare.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015.
Focuses on the "preoccupation with newness and novelty in literary, scientific, and religious discourses of the twelfth through sixteenth centuries." Examines the "newfangledness" of the "romance discourse" in SqT and alchemy in CYT.
Green, Richard Firth.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016.
Presents (in a postscript) how Chaucer's attitudes and "amused skepticism" toward fairies influenced later writers, including Spenser and Shakespeare. Analyzes connections between historiography of early modern witch-hunts and popular superstitions…
Sidhu, Nicole Nolan.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016.
Argues in Chapter 2, "Chaucer's Poetics of the Obscene: Classical Narrative and Fabliau Politics in Fragment One of the "Canterbury Tales" and the "Legend of Good Women" (pp. 76-110), that RvT taps the subversive potential of the fabliau to critique…
Robertson, Kellie.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017.
Discusses how Aristotelian natural philosophy--physics--was debated in the Middle Ages, and its influence on the aesthetic practice of Latin and vernacular writers, including Chaucer, Jean de Meun, Guillaume de Deguileville, and John Lydgate. Argues…
Nelson, Ingrid.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017.
Asserts that Chaucer's inset lyrics in TC and LGW have a "tactical" quality that gives them flexibility and contingency. In TC, Antigone's song, using both English practices and French and Italian sources, demonstrates "a tension between negotiation…
Burger, Glenn.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018.
Argues that the "invention" of the good wife in discourses of sacramental marriage, private devotion, and personal conduct "reconfigured how female embodiment was understood." Focuses on conduct texts and manuals written by men for women, including…
Drimmer, Sonja.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019.
Examines the importance of visual images in late medieval manuscripts, and the significance of manuscript illuminators in the development and spread of English literary culture. Discusses illuminated manuscripts of Chaucer's CT, and illustrated works…
Cook, Megan L.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019.
Examines how Tudor English antiquarians, including "historians, lexicographers, religious polemicists, and other readers with a professional, but, not necessary literary interest in the English past," played significant role" in the development and…
Crocker, Holly A.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019.
Investigates "premodern 'vertue,' or the embodied excellence that enables women's ethical action in vernacular English poetry between 1343 and 1623." Focuses on "material virtue"--the "natural potencies of physical bodies"--rather than on habit-,…
Orlemanski, Julie.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019.
Studies medical language and the "etiological imagination" of late medieval England, i.e., the "envisioning, arbitrating among, and emplotting [of] intricate causal chains" that seek to represent or explain the "frictional interface of causation and…
Kerby-Fulton, Kathryn.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021.
Demonstrates the importance and central role of the "clerical proletariat"--i.e., clerics who worked "in liminal spaces between the ecclesiastical and lay worlds"--in the proliferation of late medieval books and literature in English, with primary…
Weiskott, Eric.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021.
Examines "uses and misuses" of three metrical forms found in English literary history between 1350 and 1650: alliterative meter, tetrameter, and pentameter. Rejects the traditional division between medieval and modern in reexamination of Chaucer's…
Brantley, Jessica.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022.
Offers "a general introduction to manuscript studies for readers whose particular interests lie in medieval literature," commenting on material concerns, paleography, decoration and illustration, codicology, and principles of manuscript description,…
Zieman, Katherine.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,2008.
Explores how liturgical training and practice, particularly the interrelated devotional activities of singing and reading, affected literacy in late medieval England. Lay devotional ritual became separated from clerical practice, and definitions of…
McSheffrey, Shannon.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press: 2006.
An introduction, seven chapters, and a conclusion study marriage in London in the second half of the fifteenth century. The "fundamental argument is that bonds of marriage and sex were . . . intimate, deeply personal ties and matters of public…
Conrad-O'Briain, Helen.
Philip Coleman, ed. On Literature and Science: Essays, Reflections, Provocation (Dublin: Four Courts Press), 2007, pp. 27-42.
Considers FranT rather than CYT Chaucer's clearest contribution to science fiction, a genre here presented with an ancient legacy. In FranT, Chaucer uses the "tension at the heart of science fiction--between the possible and the not necessarily…
Hobsbaum, Philip.
Philip Hobsbaum. Tradition and Experiment in English Poetry (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield; London: Macmillan, 1979), pp. 30-67.
Identifies a number of ways in which Chaucer is innovative in various works--metrical variety, interplay of tones, indebtedness to Continental sources and "ingenuity," combination of narrative attachment and detachment--and surveys the range of…
Berkeley, Michael, comp.
Philip Jones Brass Ensemble. PJBE Finale: Music Written for Philip Jones (London: Chandos, 1987). 1 CD: tracks 9-13.
A five-movement suite, composed by Michael Berkeley for the Philip Jones Brass Ensemble, who are recorded here. Includes "Triton's Trumpets" (1:25), "The Grieving Queen" (3:46), "A Fanfare for the Huntsmen" (0:35), "The Sorrowful Knight" (1:51), and…
Griffiths, Jane.
Philip Knox, Jonathan Morton, and Daniel Reeve, eds. Medieval Thought Experiments: Poetry, Hypothesis, and Experience in the European Middle Ages (Turnhout: Brepols, 2018), pp. 121-39.
Interprets HF as 'an experiment in the exercise of poetic memory and poetic composition" that "suggests that memory's anarchic associations cannot fully be controlled," in part because of differences between "the memory of things and the memory of…
