Clemens, John K., and Douglas F. Mayer.
Homewood, Ill.: Dow Jones-Irwin, 1987
Included in this "practical book about leadership" are claims that CT reveals that "people can't be stereotyped" because they are essentially paradoxical. Comments most extensively on the Wife of Bath, who is "incapable of being classified, sorted,…
Gutiérrez Arranz, José María.
SELIM: Journal of the Spanish Society for Mediaeval English Language and Literature 6: 85-102, 1996.
Surveys classical concepts of authority and Chaucer's uses of classical authorities, arguing that although Chaucerian allusions reflect medieval continuity with Stoicism and Epicurianism, the poet uses classical authorities, especially Ovid, in…
Gutiérrez Arranz, Jose M.
Bernardo Santano Moreno, Adrian R. Birtwhistle, and Luis G. Girón Echevarria, eds. Papers from the VIIth International Conferenceo of SELIM (Caceres: Universidad de Extremadura, 1995), pp. 141-48.
In PF, Chaucer's Nature fulfills a double role: a divinity who presides over weddings (classical) and a mediatrix for the Christian diety (early modern).
Newman, John Kevin.
Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986.
Anatomizes the tradition of the classical epic in Western literature, from Homer to Tolstoy and Thomas Mann, tracing the "Alexandrian" mode that originated with Callimachus and his school and runs counter to the more strictly restrained tradition of…
Rudd, Niall.
Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994.
Chaucer drew on two classical sources, Virgil's "Aeneid" and Ovid's "Heroides," to illustrate two themes. In HF, complex characterizations of Venus, Aeneas, and Dido illustrate different meanings of Latin "fame"; in LGW, Dido's queenliness is…
Federico, Sylvia.
Woodbridge: York Medieval Press, 2016.
Studies the works of Thomas Walsingham for their importance in the field of late fourteenth-century English "public classical literature," helping to define this field by focusing on nuances in Walsingham's treatments of political events in…
Bernardo, Aldo S., and Saul Levin, eds.
Binghamton, N.Y.: Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 1990.
Twenty-six essays on the impact of the classics on medieval art, history, philosophy, education, and literature. Topics range widely from Coptic textiles to fourteenth-century England, from neo-Platonism to speculative grammar--all addressing the…
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…
Briggs, Charles F.
Stephen H. Rigby, ed., with the assistance of Alastair J. Minnis. Historians on Chaucer: The "General Prologue" to the "Canterbury Tales" (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 187-205.
Presents a variety of historical contexts for Chaucer's characterization of the Clerk, discussing medieval universities, manuscripts from fourteenth-century Oxford, and the role of clerks in medieval society. Includes appendices of "Manuscripts…
Middleton, Anne.
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 2 (1980): 121-50.
Examines medieval redactions of Boccaccio's Griselda story to suggest that Chaucer retells it in order to raise literary questions analogous to moral ones. The Clerk combines Petrarch's affective purpose and high style with the exemplary force and…
Walsh, Lora.
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 43 (2021): 75–109.
Interprets Griselda of ClT "as the late medieval English Church wedded to a secular power [Walter] that would radically dominate and divest her in the name of reform." Resists "domineering exegetical acts," using "literary and feminist…
Lenaghan, R. T.
Larry D. Benson, ed. The Learned and the Lewed: Studies in Chaucer and Medieval Literature. Harvard English Studies, no. 5 (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974), pp. 31-43.
Argues that in SqT, FranT, KnT, and TC Chaucer used romance to reconcile his two responsibilities as a lay clerk: "to speak of morality and of the refinements of love."
Grossi, Joseph L.,Jr.
Richard J. Utz, ed. Literary Nominalism and the Theory of Rereading Late Medieval Texts: A New Research Paradigm (Lewiston, N.Y.; Queenston, Ont.; Lampeter, Wales: Edwin Mellen, 1995), pp. 147-78.
Reads ClT as a realist's attack on nominalism, with Walter depicting an unfree diety, and Griselda, rampant fideism. Chaucer moderates the Clerk's realism at the end of the Tale and in the Envoy.
Swan, Marjorie E.
English Studies in Canada 13 (1987): 136-46.
In telling his tale, the Clerk gradually abandons his allegorical refutation of the Wife's view of marriage by becoming more critical of Walter and more sympathetic to the human plight of Griselda, whom he comes to regard as an embodiment of natural…
Hilmo, Maidie.
Journal of the Early Book Society 10 (2007): 71-105.
Hilmo encourages the view that wood-cuts enhance text through visual rhetoric; specifically, Caxton's addition of a bow to Chaucer's Clerk in his edition of CT represents the Clerk as a moral satirist.
Van Dyke, Carolynn.
Studies In the Age of Chaucer 17 (1995): 45-66.
Griselda and Dorigen embody more coherent subjectivities than do their counterparts in analogous tales, although neither becomes a true agent in the outcome of her plot.
Hui-jeong, Seon.
Medieval and Early Modern English Studies 22.2 (2014): 31-59.
Examines the irony and paradoxes of ClT, claiming that through the Tale, the Clerk "challenges an audience as Griselda's impassive patience challenges Walter." Views the Clerk as a "complicated figure of utter submissiveness and essential silence…
Winny, James, ed.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966.
Presents ClPT in Middle English (based on Robinson's 1957 edition), with notes and glossary at the end of the text, along with an appendix (pp. 91-99) that offers lines 4.813-924 of ClT in facing-page juxtaposition with one of its source texts, "Le…
Loganbill, Dean
William C. Johnson and Loren C. Gruber, eds. "New" Views on Chaucer: Essays in Generative Criticism (Denver: Society for New Language Study, 1973), pp. 29-34.
Locates examples of modernism and the "absurdist point of view" in ClT and MLT, suggesting points of comparison with Samuel Beckett's "Waiting for Godot."
One should not apply a naturalistic test to ClT, which displays the traditional characteristics of the parable--an illustrative story directed to a single point. The point here is that Griselda is true to God, which is a sufficient principle of life…
Outrage at Walter's treatment of Griselda, seeing Griselda's story as a religious allegory of patience, even seeing it as a folk tale rewritten--such responses indicate that ClT is a poem "divided against itself." One way to resolve these conflicts…
