Binski, Paul, and Patrick Zutshi, with the collaboration of Stella Panayotova.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
Comprehensive catalog of western European illuminated manuscripts in the Cambridge University Library. Includes several indices of iconography, scribes, artists, binders, and authors (with Chaucer listed under "G" for Geoffrey), along with…
Binski, Paul.
Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 74 (2011): 121-54.
Discusses biblical kings represented in the "camera depicta" of the Westminster Chamber, also treated in several literary works on kingship, including MkT and a short passage in ParsT. The Chamber's murals proclaim the Plantagenet kings to be "ideal…
Binski, Paul.
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013.
Describes and illustrates the "visual arts as a whole" in late medieval England. The index records some twenty references to Chaucer, including a section on HF (pp. 345–48) that shows that "the two largest passages of writing about architecture at…
Includes discussion of the treatment of KnT, WBT, NPT, and "The Floure and the Leafe" in Dryden's "Fables Ancient and Modern," arguing that he adjusted his sources to suit his neo-classical audience.
Its fierce anti-Semitism notwithstanding, "Titus and Vespasian" is an important document of cultural uses of the "fall-of-Jerusalem narrative" and of attitudes toward Jews and Judaism in late medieval England. Thus, it deserves scholarly attention…
Birhanzel, Candace.
[Jay Ruud, ed.] Papers on the "Canterbury Tales": From the 1989 NEH Chaucer Institute, Northern State University, Aberdeen, South Dakota ([Aberdeen, S.D.: Northern State University, 1989), pp. 112-25.
Comments on reading ClT as both "realistic and religious, tied to the character of . . . the Clerk."
Birney, Earle.
Toronto, Buffalo, and London: University of Toronto Press, 1985.
Eight previously published essays (1937-61) by Birney, arranged as chapters in a study of Chaucer's experiments and development as an ironist. Treats Chaucer's use of "structural irony" in MilT, FrT, SumT, and ManT. Updates bibliographies for each…
Explores details, emphases, ironies, and double ironies in the GP description of the Manciple and in ManPT, characterizing him as "shrewd," "smug," and "indiscrete"--a "successful rascal" who aspires to "gentil" status, is "insecure," and overly…
Explores the diction and imagery of MilT, focusing on oral and olfactory instances for the ways that they ironically anticipate details of the plot, particularly the misdirected kiss received by Absolon and colter-burn he directs at Nicholas.
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,…
