Browse Items (16472 total)

Comments on Umberto Eco's, Jacques Derrida's, and Marianne Dekoven's contributions to animal studies, and assesses the Host's references to "jade" and "trede-fowl" in NPP and NPE as "prime examples" of the "human habit of appropriating the animal…

Comments on forerunners of ecocritical thinking in medieval literature, and explores the connotations of "green" (often in contrast with "blue") in Wom Unc, SqT, FrT, WBT, and "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," arguing that medieval usage reflects a…

Notes that Chaucer's treatment of the daisy in LGW differs from his typical use of flower imagery. Recognizes parallels between the daisy in LGW and its narrator Geffrey, notes differences between the narrator(s) of the F prologue and the G prologue,…

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…

A verse letter in "Female Tatler", no. 70, mentions "Sir Jeffrey Chaucer" and alludes implicitly to TC and Pandarus's offer of procurement.

Two references in John Jones's sixteenth-century "The Arte and Science of Preserving Bodie and Soule in Healthe, Wisedome, and Catholike Religion" praise Chaucer's English language and ParsT.

Two references by Stephen Hawes to Chaucer (along with Gower and Lydgate) not noted by Spurgeon are contained in "The Comforte of Hope." The unique copy of this work, printed by Wynkyn de Worde about 1512, is in The British Library.

Examines the medieval conception of sight (both as sense and as ingress of the seen to the soul) in TC and Malory.

Argues that TC "dramatizes" the relations among vision, imagination, reason, and intellect found in Bo, tracing the effects of the lovers' "faulty reasoning" in failing to progress from sight-based earthly pleasure to eternal good, emphasized in…

Argues "that Chaucer developed his own theory of sound in his dream vision poetry." His theory--that sound travels and transforms rather than dissipates--was adapted from his scientific learning," particularly Boethius's "De institutione musica."…

Discusses Chaucer and Langland in this study of outlawry, suggesting that the sovereign ban may be interpreted as a Galenic purgation of imbalance in the body politic.

Studies the tradition of rhetorical "occupatio" and Chaucer's uses of the device in BD, HF, LGW, TC, and KnT.

Chaucer's ironic treatment of the Dido legend in LGW and HF involves a naive narrator who erroneously sympathizes with Dido; a medieval audience would have recognized differences from the treatment of Dido in Virgil's Aeneid and Ovid's Heroides. …

Identifies parallels between Browning's "Childe Roland" and HF, evinces Browning's familiarity with Chaucer's poem, and indicates that, thematically, "Roland's quest" represents the "lifelong struggle of a poet in search of lasting fame."

HF contains an inordinate number of lists of seemingly disparate materials in random order. Chaucer challenges the concept of authority by suggesting that the lists themselves provide the "authority"--not any one central force. Readers authorize a…

With the fourteenth-century philosophical division between faith and reason, or single and multiple authorities, English poetry reveals new tensions, as shown in "Pearl," "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," and "Piers Plowman." HF,with its many…

Four Platonic "forms" infuse Chaucer's works: eating and drinking, sexuality and love, play and seriousness, and the making of art.

Chaucer made at least two authenticated journeys to Italy whereby he gained a knowledge of the works of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. Curiously, though he borrowed extensive narrative material from Boccaccio, Chaucer never mentions him by name as…

Chaucer gives large emphasis and exaggerated length to the didactic. Mel and ParsT are so solidly "there" in the structure of CT that we would not understand the dynamics of the poem if we did not take them into account. Chaucer vies with Dante in…

Aristotle's "Nichomachean Ethics" and "Rhetoric" and the Costinian "Tractate" can be used to anatomize comedy in CT.

Comments on Chaucer's "serious" poetry for the ways that it relates to various kinds of tragedy and tragic outlook--classical Greek, Boethian, "pathetic tragedy," ethical or moral tragedy, etc. Except in extreme cases such as MkT, Chaucer inflects…

Describes the aesthetic and moral principles and practices, overt and covert, of the CT, acclaiming the vitality of the "framing structure" of the links and the complex ironies of the narrator (especially in Ret) for the ways that they enable and…

Assesses Chaucer's uses of Boccaccio and Boethius as source material in KnT, addressing the omission of Arcite's apotheosis and the subordination of the pagan gods to providential order. Focuses on Palamon's and Arcite's prayers and Theseus' final…

Seeks to illuminate "the kind of order that Chaucer was in the process of imposing" on the CT, focusing on the "definite beginning" and "definite end" rather than the "great middle." Treats GP, where Chaucer sets his topic ("variety of the created…

Suggests that Chaucer's description of the embodiment of human speech in HF (1068-81) was influenced by Dante's similar concern in "Paradiso" 4.37-48.