Browse Items (16538 total)

Argues that "gnof" (MilT 1.3188) is Chaucer's neologism, clarifying the trouble his scribes had with the word, detailing its later use in English (especially in association with Kett's Rebellion of 1575), and establishing the likelihood that Chaucer…

Item not seen. A WorldCat record indicates that the four essays, addressed to high school students, consider CT under the following titles: "Chaucer, Society and the General Prologue," "Chaucer and Medieval Thought," "Chaucer and Medieval Tradition,"…

Collection of essays that address medieval and medievalism themes and how they continue to impact contemporary perspectives. The introduction includes a history of medievalism from the fourteenth to the twenty-first centuries, and remarks how…

Collection of essays reflecting contemporary topics in linguistic and literary research on the Middle Ages. For three essays that pertain to Chaucer, search for Studies in Middle English: Words, Forms, Senses and Texts under Alternative Title.

Cotton Titus A. XX, an anthology of fourteenth-century Latin poems, contains no. 19, "Proprietaties multorum animalium et aliarorum," some antimedical satires and bestiary poems. One of the latter, a poem on the sparrowhawk, may be the source of the…

Records a Latin poem written by Clemens upon visiting Chaucer's tomb. The poem indicates that Clemens was familiar with Chaucer through Sir Frances Kynaston's Latin version of TC 1-2.

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…

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…

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…

Comments on reading ClT as both "realistic and religious, tied to the character of . . . the Clerk."

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.

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…

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…

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…

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…

A version of the author's 1991 dissertation of the same title; see Dissertation Abstracts International 52 (1991): 1321-22.

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…