Browse Items (16472 total)

Focuses on the poetic form made famous by "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" and Th, but also considers poetic form in the scorpion passage of BD and alliteration in ParsP. Discusses myths surrounding the "bob and wheel" form that are often…

Distinguishes between Chaucer the poet. and Chaucer the pilgrim-narrator of CT, characterizing the "persona" of the latter as "shy" but "gregarious," one who admires the "values" of high society, the "material prosperity" of the bourgeoisie, and good…

Surveys critics' attention to Chaucer's word-play, and shows through multiple examples that such play is more common in his works than previously observed, especially his early works. Clarifies kinds of word-play in medieval rhetoric and…

Argues that the Reeve's sword is rusty (GP 1.618) "because the Reeve is past the age for using it." Suggests that he wears it as a symbol of his desire for youth and comments on Chaucer's multiple uses of signifying details.

Explores and explains rhetorical emphases in the narrator's growth in understanding of the Black Knight's loss in BD, arguing that full realization comes (in ll. 1309-10) only after it "had been subordinated first by confusion and then by…

Recounts the scholarly tally of puns in Chaucer, locates the device in rhetorical tradition, and clarifies its wide range of stylistic effects. Then provides an alphabetical list of puns in Chaucer's works (more than 100), both previously known…

Argues that, although derived from differing sources, the three parts of PF--the prelude, the garden of love, and the debate--are unified in their presentation of three perspectives on love. Framed as a conventional love vision, the poem juxtaposes a…

Characterizes the dreamer of BD as consistently stupid, a "nonpareil of dullwittedness"-- technically, psychologically, and allegorically.

Considers manuscripts, editions, translations, and contemporary examples to explore Troilus's use of "devel" in TC 1.623, documenting variety in reading it as direct address, expletive, or exclamation. Shows that Troilus is not calling Pandarus a…

Assesses the "artistic role" in TC of the narrator--a commentator and a "historian [who] meticulously maintains a distance between himself and the events in the story." Explores "temporal, spatial, aesthetic, and religious" devices in the poem…

Augments Baum's earlier dictionary of puns (PMLA 71 [1956]), with nearly 30 more examples noticed by Baum and by readers of his earlier listing, exemplifying and explaining each.

Identifies a cut-down single-page portion of Book 1 of TC ("Cecil" manuscript), found attached to the cover of a rent book in Hatfield House. Provides a facsimile, transcription, table of variants, and commentary.

Provides textual evidence to confirm that the three portions of the Middle English Rom--A, B, and C--derive from different manuscript groupings of their French source, the "Roman de la Rose," corroborating arguments that the three portions were…

Aligns details of GP 1.361-78 with historical evidence to argue that the five tradesmen or "Burgesses" described by Chaucer belonged to a "craft fraternity [rather than a parish fraternity] and that the Drapers' Fraternity (or Brotherhood of St. Mary…

Traces developments in Chaucer's "attitude to love" as reflected in his narrative personae in BD, LGWP, PF, HF, and TC, assessing this attitude in light of the courtly, Chartrian, and neo-Platonic standards of works by Alain de Lille, Jean de Meun,…

Identifies a series of analogues to the book-burning episode in WBP 3.816 in eastern versions of the "Seven Sages" (or "Books of Sindibad"), identifying similarities and differences between them and Chaucer's account, and suggesting that oral…

Considers the eagle of HF "in the light of medieval expositions of the soaring eagle as an image of the flight of thought," focusing on the bird as an "intellectual symbol" and its flight as an "act of contemplation" as seen in Gregory's "Moralia in…

Argues that "to see Chaucer the pilgrim as anyone other than a marvelously alert, ironic, facetious master of every situation is to misread" CT. Particularly in his views of churchmen and uses of superlatives, the narrator is best understood as "a…

Examines HF as a literary satire, a comic send-up of the love vision genre, evident in the naiveté of the narrator and his failure to attain love or information about it. The poem's "central structural idea" is "comic disillusionment," underscored…

Rejects claims that Criseyde expected to surrender herself to Troilus when she went to Pandarus's house in Book 3 of TC. Examines questions of plot, detail, and emphasis, and argues that her actions were neither fated nor dependent upon prior…

Emends the punctuation of CYT 8.1236-39 found in the editions of W. W. Skeat and F. N. Robinson, assigning the enjoinder in the first half of the quotation to the Yeoman's canon and the second half to the Yeoman as narrator.

Associates Scudamour of Edmund Spenser's The Fairie Queene IV.x with "Chaucerian" mastery in love, drawing parallels with love in KnT and contrasts with love in FranT, the latter quoted by Spenser in III.i.25, 8-9.

Argues that the "artistic unity" of NPT is evident in "light of the [Nun's] Priest's personality," a man who is dissatisfied with "his position in life as a servant to a group of women." Differences between NPT and its source in the "Renart"…

Explores the juxtaposition of the accounts of Lucifer and Adam in the opening of MkT (7.1999-2014), surveying medieval theological and Old and Middle English literary traditions of Adam's time in hell or, alternatively, limbo, and arguing that…

Reads MerT as a composite of "various comic attitudes toward lust and marriage," not as the bitter vituperation of an angry narrator, arguing that the latter, conventional view results from seeking to impose "organic unity" on four "strikingly…