Browse Items (16472 total)

Assesses the depiction of female-gendered Nature in Brunetto Latini's "Il Tesoretto," Alain de Lille's "De planctu naturae," Jean de Meun's "Roman de la Rose," and Chaucer's PF. A modern ecofeminst approach to these depictions helps disclose the…

William Blake's painting "The Canterbury Pilgrims" and his commentary on it in a "Descriptive Catalog" (1809) are a "complex allegory of life, where the classicist belief in the imitation of nature is thoroughly discarded." Blake returns to a…

Explores possible influences of Chaucer's dream poems on the works of Charles of Orleans, especially on the dream episodes in the English poems of British Museum MS Harley 682 attributed to Charles. Similarities in pattern and verbal detail may have…

Examines the life, tomb, and library of Alice Chaucer--granddaughter of the poet--to suggest how we might reconstruct a women's literary culture of the fifteenth century. Alice's literary taste was influenced by her father, Thomas Chaucer; by the…

ClT maintains a tension between the interpretive multiplicity of Boccaccio's version of the tale and the hermeneutic closure of Petrarch's translation. The integration of Griselda and her heirs into hereditary hierarchy may help explain the…

In his "Legend of Holy Women," Osbern Bokenham "offers something formally similar but ideologically opposite" to LGW. Bokenham parodies Chaucer's work, thus reasserting the hagiographical genre that Chaucer undercut, and indirectly critiques…

Chaucer's use of the name "Eglentyne" in the description of the Prioress in GP and in a scene of KnT emphasizes the disparity between reality and the courtly love tradition.

The Italian city-state of Lombardy and the life and death of Bernabo, its most famous tyrant, provides inspiration for the fictional realm of "Lumbardye," which functions in Chaucer's works as a spatial metaphor for tyranny.

An illustrated analysis of moral and aesthetic issues raised by Chaucer. The rocks, garden, and study that form the loci of FranT carry iconographic meaning suggesting a true poetics of illusion.

Chaucer's presentation of himself as a reader of literature is a metaphor for our own reading of his work, an acknowledgement of his concern with the reciprocal relationship between the reader's mind and the text.

The various fictional levels in CT result in a dialectic relationship between voice and genre, especially pronounced in Fragment D.

The characters of individual pilgrims are revealed through their speech, which often serves to underline their philosophical viewpoints. Chaucer's awareness of language and its creative powers reflects a general skepticism regarding the…

The theory that "words can reveal to the inner eye of understanding the invisible forms behind visible shapes" is rejected through repeated examples of "the complicity of sight in the tragedy of love."

Examines the equation of political and poetic authority in the works of Chaucer and his contemporaries. Historical romance tends to legitimize political authority and to cite poetic authority, while the fabliau pretends to chronicle true occurences…

Chaucer's PardT "anticipates, and/or possibly draws on, the techniques and devices of the English moral play." CT is a "play" or game, and PardT is in effect "an early moral play." A "ful 'vicious' man," the Pardoner himself is a vice.

Discusses "Chaucer's feeling for the openness of questions, his distrust of final answers" in TC, NPT, and PF. Chaucer has an "unsettling ability to make every alternative attractive, even clearly sinful ones."

Argues that Chaucer was the "Father of English Prudery" because (fabliaux notwithstanding) he elevated and purified the English language by inventing a language of circumlocution and courtly indirection and by substituting Latinate terms for the…

Examines words and phrases in Th to reveal "hidden elements of satire and parody," which are intensified by Chaucer's masterful and paradoxical handling of the author in the text. The language of satire and parody defies translation.

Elucidates the puzzling portrait of the GP Knight by "historical information on chivalry" and especially on knights who went to Prussia as "Crusaders"; modifies opposing views of the Knight (as chivalric ideal or murderous hypocrite).

Traces the theme of authority versus experience through BD, HF, TC, LGW, WBP, ParsT, and Ret.

Focusing on authority, knowledge, and character, Minnis argues that Chaucer was aware of the fourteenth-century theological debate on the validity of a moral tale told by an immoral man.

Argues that "Chaucer is as much a religious artist as a comic artist" and that to exclude either fabliaux or religious tales is to reduce the achievement of CT. Examines the common aesthetic of PrT, SNT, MLT, and ClT, which despite their stylistic…

In the context of medieval culture from the late eleventh century to Chaucer's time, the author examines Chaucer's faith and orthodoxy in ABC, ParsT, MLT, Mel, ClT, PrT, SNT, and Ret, as opposed to his critical spirit in his portrayals of various…

Argues that Jürgen Habermas's concept of the "public sphere" shares features with Chaucer's notion of "commune profit" in PF. Both concepts suggest or insist that the political body must be open and generative, cognizant of the physical as well as…

Traces the development of body-soul relations in Western intellectual tradition as they are reflected in LGW, in book 1 of Edmund Spenser's "Faerie Queene," and in Richard Burton's "Anatomy of Melancholy." Uses St. Augustine as a point of departure…