Birney, Earle.
Review of English Literature 1.3 (1960): 9-18.
Explores the GP description of the Yeoman, affiliating him with the Squire rather than with the Knight, and concentrating on details of his dress and equipage that contribute to a "sense of gay holiday panoply" associated with the Squire.
Examines "ironic foreshadowings, ambiguities and reversals" in SumT, arguing that they give it "a subtle and satisfying unity." Focuses on overturned expectations, dramatic ironies, and poetic justice in the plot, in the friar's lecture to Thomas,…
Reads FrT as "one of Chaucer's more carefully worked and closely unified poems, and, . . . one of his most dramatic." Focuses on the poem's "Faustian situation," its '"unusual withholding of the denouement," and "its moral implication," exploring…
Birney, Earle.
Notes and Queries 204 (1959): 345-47.
Clarifies the Franklin's "morning dish" of a "wine-sop," suggesting dietary or medicinal implications necessary to compensate for his culinary excesses.
In MLT, Custance's first husband is the "Sowdan of Surrye," and in "Macbeth" the witches plot to scourge a shipmaster who is "to Aleppo gone." That both texts treat Syria and the northern reaches of Great Britain as complementary zones, in space as…
Birns, Nicholas.
Nicholas Birns. Barbarian Memory: The Legacy of Early Medieval History in Early Modern Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 44–59.
Assesses the uses of late Antique historiography in MLT and in Gower's Prologue to his "Confessio Amantis," comparing Gower's depiction of the late Roman empire and that of Otto of Freising's "Chronica," and arguing that the ultimate source of MLT is…
Bisceglia, Julie Jeanne.
Dissertation Abstracts International 41 (1980): 258A.
TC can be read with two distinct poetic traditions in mind: the serious, Platonic ideal represented by Dante, which desires absolute truth, purposeful behavior, and an immutable self; and the Ovidian rhetorical ideal which upholds behavior shaped by…
Biscoglio, Frances.
Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 25 (1995): 163-77.
While the iconography of the spinning woman is generally considered to represent domestic virtue, it can also demonstrate either a model of misaligned femininity, as exemplified by Cenobia in MkT (7.2373-74), or an instance of role reversal--a mark…
Like the Valiant Woman of Proverbs 31:10-31, Cecilia brings honor to her husband, manages her household well, works untiringly, and faces danger with fearless self-confidence. In contrast to Harry Bailly, who sets up the rules and pragmatic externals…
Bishop, Ian.
London and Melbourne: Everyman's University Library, 1987.
Reviews various theories about the overall design of CT, warning that individual tales can be ignored, though CT is greater than the sum of its parts, and that Chaucer's final intentions concerning the order of the tales are unknown. In an analysis…
Bishop, Ian.
Bristol: Univeristy of Bristol Academic Publications, 1981.
The poem's central interest lies in the attempt by two human souls to establish the deepest and most testing of relationships. The representation of this relationship involves more than a dialogue: it insinuates a dialectical process that worries…
Bishop, Ian.
Review of English Studies 30 (1979): 257-67.
A framework for the function of the medieval world of learning in NPT can be found in the scheme of the Seven Liberal Arts (grammar, rhetoric, dialectic, astrology, arithmetic, geometry, and music). Although arithmetic and geometry are too abstract…
Bishop, Ian.
Boris Ford, ed. The New Pelican Guide to English Literature, Volume 1, Part 1: Medieval Literature: Chaucer and the Alliterative Tradition (New York and Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1982), pp. 174-87.
Treats TC and KnT together because each derives from a source by Boccaccio and because each includes Boethian thought; also considers the Shakespearean analogues of each and compares each with opera, Books 1-3 of TC correspond to the "medieval…
Attributes the aesthetic success of the three-rioters account in PardT to Chaucer's suggestive "economy" of characterization and narrative and to the double perspective ("drunken fantasy" and "sober calculation") that irrevocably leads to death,…
Bishop, Kathleen [A.]
Nancy M. Reale and Ruth E. Sternglantz, eds. Satura: Studies in Medieval Literature in Honour of Robert R. Raymo (Donington: Shaun Tyas, 2001), pp. 227-37.
Identifies a number of points of comparison between Juan Ruiz's "El Libro" and CT: wide range of genres, ecclesiastical satire, comparable characters (e.g., the Prioress and Doña Garoa; the Wife of Bath and Trotaconventos), narrators'…
Bishop, Kathleen A.
Dissertation Abstracts International 58 (1998): 4643A.
Explores how classical comedy (especially Plautus and Ovid) and medieval elegiac comedies influenced Chaucer's fabliaux and the fabliau elements of ManT, WBP, TC, and the Prologue to the apocryphal Tale of Beryn.
Bishop, Kathleen A.
Chaucer Review 35: 294-317, 2001.
Classical and medieval Latin influences on the fabliaux are as important to analyze as are the analogues Chaucer draws upon for his tales. Specifically, a close consideration of Plautus and Latin elegiac comedy can lead to a fuller understanding of…
Bishop, Kathleen A.
Kathleen A. Bishop, ed. "The Canterbury Tales" Revisited--21st Century Interpretations (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2008), pp. 16-26.
Asserts several parallels between the window scene in MilT and reports of the sodomitical execution of Edward II.
Bishop, Kathleen A., ed.
Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2008.
Eighteen essays by various authors, with a foreword by David Matthews (pp. x-xiv) and a preface by the editor (pp. xv-xvi). For individual essays, search for "CanterburyTales" Revisited under Alternative Title.
Bishop, Kathleen A., ed.
Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2010.
Thirteen essays by various authors, most of them concerned with the influence of Chaucer's work or his reception. For individual essays, search for Standing in the Shadow of the Master? under Alternative Title.
Bishop, Laura M.
Journal of English and Germanic Philology 106 (2007): 336-63.
Bishop assesses how the apparatus ("peritext") in Speght's edition of Chaucer's Works evokes Chaucer as a living presence and situates his poetry in the midst of Tudor politics. Although Speght derives much of his peritext from Thynne and Stow, his…
Bishop, Louise M.
Texas Studies in Literature and Language 44 : 231-46, 2002.
Augustine's glossing of God's corporeality (especially pertaining to Exodus 33) underlies the comments on the limitations of human knowledge in MilP. Confusion about the nature of flesh and about orifices hints at the ultimate ineffability of God's…
