Surveys English literature from the Old English period to "Post-War and Post-Modern Literature," including a chronology and a comprehensive index. The section on Chaucer (pp. 55-63) emphasizes his "delight in the concept of cosmic, natural, and human…
Sanders, Arnold A.
David G. Allen and Robert A. White, eds. The Work of Dissimilitude: Essays from the Sixth Citadel Conference on Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Newark: University of Delaware Press; London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1992), pp. 196-215.
Examines Gower's tale of Canace, the Man of Law's reference to the account, and the narrative treatment of the character Canace in SqT, arguing that Spenser fused them in his Canace. In his second (1596) edition of "The Faerie Queene" Spenser…
Sanders, Arnold.
Journal of the Early Book Society 17 (2014): 221-29.
Uses personal copy for close comparison with 1687 edition, and views book history as evidence of increasing inability to decode Middle English and the beginning of antiquarianism and collectable Chaucer.
Sanders, Barry Roy.
Dissertation Abstracts International 28.03 (1967): 1058A.
Surveys scholarship concerning Chaucer's word-play, describes the place of "double-entendre" in rhetorical tradition, and explicates 204 of Chaucer's word-plays in CT, concluding that there is some correlation between punning and the bawdy tales.
Sanders, Barry.
David R. Olson and Nancy Torrance, eds. Literacy and Orality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 111-28.
In GP, Chaucer poses himself as a "liar," capable of impossible feats of memory; in tales such as MilT, he capitalizes on the oral genre of joking. As a liar and a joker, the literate Chaucer manipulates oral expectations, compelling his audience to…
Sanders, Barry.
Studies in Medieval Culture 4 (1974): 437-45.
WBP/WBT are best read as one woman's satire of both preachers and their anti-feminist propaganda. Attacking antifeminism in medieval preaching, she uses the structure of the medieval sermon.
A history of laughter in Western literature, focusing on the relation between laughter and literature, and surveying ancient, medieval, and modern traditions. In his Introduction, Sanders credits Chaucer with associating the roles of the feminine…
Sanders, Barry.
Barbara Lounsberry and others, eds. The Tales We Tell: Perspectives on the Short Story (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998), pp. 55-62.
Considers the relations among jokes and short stories, focusing on MilT as a "well-made" short story and regarding the Reeve's response as evidence of the social balance accomplished through jokes and fiction.
Sanders, Barry.
Papers on Language and Literature 3, supplement (1967): 3-13.
Discusses the theme of distorted love in HF, where "love of self" is depicted as replacing the ideal of "'commune profit,' that is love for others and for the larger order of the universe" held together by the "great chain." Argues that courtly love…
Sandidge, Marilyn.
Albrecht Classen, ed. Old Age in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: Interdisciplinary Approaches to a Neglected Topic. (New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2007), pp. 357-73.
Youthful attitudes toward old age in the works of Boccaccio and Chaucer differ strikingly, perhaps because of demographic changes caused by the Black Plague. In Boccaccio, youth respects the wisdom of age, whereas in Chaucer young people resent the…
Sands, Donald B.
Chaucer Review 12 (1978): 171-82.
The Wife of Bath is neither a comic figure as Donaldson and others see her, nor a tragic figure as several other critics see her. Instead she is, as Beryl Rowland suggests, a neurotic and a misfit.
Based on the language of Robinson's second edition, treats phonology and morphology of Chaucer's works and examines the differences between Chaucer's language and Modern English.
Sanok, Catherine.
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 20 (1998): 41-71.
Explores the allusions to Statius's "Thebaid" in TC and identifies several structural similarities between the poems. Criseyde's reading of the epic and Cassandre's summary of it depict female consciousness of history and awareness of the…
Sanok, Catherine.
Dissertation Abstracts International 60: 2482A, 1999.
Lives of virgin martyr saints became a majority in the genre, appealing predominantly to a female audience and providing "expressions of devotion rather than exhortations to devotion." Sanok discusses works of Chaucer, Margery Kempe, Christine de…
Alceste's request for a "legend" of good women and reference to Queen Anne combine to establish the audience of LGW, raising questions about the gender ideology of saints' legends and resisting the "misogynist antiphrasis" recurrent in antifeminist…
Sanok, Catherine.
New Medieval Literatures 5 : 177-201, 2002.
PhyT and Pearl both explore the assumption that the communal and anagogical can subsume the individual and ethical, an assumption underlying Fredric Jameson's historicist theorizing. The ending of PhyT indicates the "hermeneutic limits" of virgin…
Sanok assesses the urban performances of virgin martyr and Marian plays and the "exemplarity" of female saints' legends, examining how authorities sought to contain or appropriate the subversive potential of female piety. Considers SNT and how the…
Sanok, Catherine.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007.
Discusses the creation of female audiences, examining LGW and other works (including WBT) to explore how saints' lives shaped literary history, thus making women "visible participants" in vernacular literary culture. Alceste is a metonym for a…
Sanok, Catherine.
Frank Grady, ed. The Cambridge Companion to "The Canterbury Tales" (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), pp. 89-104.
Traces several interpretative concerns raised by MLT and demonstrates how the tale "has much to teach us about the layered, multipart narrative of project" of CT. Discusses "gender and religious difference," the secular and the sacred, the…
Sanok, Catherine.
Exemplaria: A Journal of Theory in Medieval and Renaissance Studies 34 (2022): 252-59.
Explores relations among "crisis, ambivalence, and futurity," focusing on TC and "Amis and Amiloun," "assessing Criseyde''s ambivalence about returning to Troy as "an affective correlative of crisis" and Amis's ambivalence about the sacrificial…
