Alisoun has learned through experience that her marital happiness depends upon practical economic control rather than on surrender to the ideals of feminine subservience espoused by authorities. Her tale parodies these authorities in its…
Chaucer's illustrates the reciprocity of hearing and speaking by demonstrating how perfectly the characters of TC understand each other's indirectly spoken meanings. The reader's complicity in this implit communication is stressed particularly in…
The rhyme royal stanza takes its name from the fact that it was used in ballade contests in the fourteenth century to address real or imaginary royalty. Chaucer employed the stanza first for royal address in PF and TC. In MLT he used it to create a…
Smith, Nathaniel B., and Evan Carton.
PMLA 94 (1979): 948-50.
An exchange of letters in the PMLA Forum section letters that comment on the meaning of "authority" in the Middle Ages, particularly Chaucer's uses of the notion.
Jordan, Robert M., James I Wimsatt, and Mary Carruthers.
PMLA 94 (1979): 950-53.
An exchange of letters in the PMLA Forum section that comment on the characterization of the Wife of Bath and the role of sources (especially Jerome) and historical contexts in understanding the character.
Leicester, H. Marshall,Jr.
PMLA 95 (1980): 213-24.
Readers have over-emphasized the persona of the narrator(s) in CT, making the tales themselves but an appendage to the frame. But in fact there are many internal contradictions in such a "dramatic" reading of the poem. The tales are insistently…
In Chaucer's famous line "I trowe he were a geldyng or a mare" the word "mare" is best glossed "homosexual," and the description of the Pardoner fits all three medieval confusions with homosexuality: effeminacy, eunuchy, and hermaphroditism.
Burlin, Robert B., and H. Marshall Leicester, Jr.
PMLA 95 (1980): 880-82.
An exchange of letters in the PMLA Forum section that comment on textuality, narrative "absence," narrative "presence," and their usefulness in discussing "voice" in GP.
Manuscript evidence indicates that only after Chaucer's death did editors assemble copies of individual tales and links to arrange the fragments (reflecting various stages of development in Chaucer's plan) into their differing ideas of a coherent…
Medieval fable cannot be read as though each animal or figure held a fixed allegorical meaning. NPT, for instance, could signify as many meanings as subsequent readers have postulated.
The Pardoner threatens to lead the pilgrims astray to venerate his dubious relics, not to seek Saint Thomas. PardT mirrors this aberrancy. Thus the Host, as acknowledged leader, must be the one to snub him violently before order can be restored.
Arabic literature--characteristically framed, open-ended, "eye-witness," first-person narrative, often including a journey--prefigures Boccaccio's "Decameron," Gower's "Confessio Amantis," and Chaucer's CT. Petrus Alfonsi's twelfth-century…
The Pardoner's invitation is not a physical threat to the pilgrimage but a further sign of his propensity to profit from others and to compensate for his "sexual difference." Storm's essay appeared in PMLA 97 (1982): 810-18.
Storm does not distinguish between his own and Chaucer's attitudes toward the Pardoner's homosexuality. Storm's essay appeared in PMLA 97 (1982): 810-18.
The Pardoner's invitation is not an attempt to divert the pilgrims from their journey, and the Host's response is designed to restore the fellowship of the pilgrims, not to improve their spiritual well-being. Storm's essay appeared in PMLA 97…
The Pardoner's self-revelation "heightens the challenge" of deceiving the pilgrims at the end of the sermon and does not preclude it. Chaucer uses the Host's response to the Pardoner's invitation to point to the pilgrims' spiritual weakness--even if…
With Chaucer's Criseyde (as with Malory's Guinevere), readers are forced to construct her character from the "implicature" of her acts and words rather than deduce it from explicit and consistent statements.
Owen, Charles A., Jr., Caroline D.Eckhardt, and Katharine Slater Gittes.
PMLA 98 (1983): 902-04.
An exchange of letters in the PMLA Forum section that comment on openendedness and closure in CT and the influence of Arabic literary models on Chaucer.
The "fragmentary state" of CT and its lack of definitive ending may reflect external circumstances, yet its "open-endedness" may be part of its structural plan.
In her essay Gittes overemphasizes generalizations about Arabic mathematics, architecture, and literature, especially its "atomization" into component units.
The open-ended frame of CT derives ultimately from Indo-European rather than Arabic aesthetic; Arabic influence on medieval Europe is nonetheless significant.
