Scala, Elizabeth.
Film History 29.1-2: 34-45, 1999.
Argues that the 1990 film Pretty Woman is understandable as an analogue to medieval Fair Unknown romances and that, like WBT, the film affirms and inverts the ideology of romance through self-conscious nostalgia.
Scala, Elizabeth.
Journal x: A Journal in Culture and Criticism 4: 171-90, 2000.
Critical attempts to find structural cohesion or unity in CTare misguided. Instead of reading over or past the interruptions, omissions, and inconsistencies of the poem, we ought to recognize that, in many ways, its absences are central to its…
Scala, Elizabeth.
Medieval Feminist Forum 30: 27-37, 2000.
Assesses "gossip" about an emotional or sexual relationship between Rickert and John Matthews Manly, co-editors of "The Text of the Canterbury Tales" (1940).
Scala, Elizabeth.
Houndmills, Basingstoke; and New York: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2002.
Scala studies absence as a structural feature of late-medieval English narratives, arguing that absence reflects the manuscript culture in which the narratives are preserved and that it is reflected in the critical and theoretical responses to these…
Assesses the debate between psychoanalytic and historicist critics, arguing that psychoanalytic assumptions and interpretations are embedded in historicist analysis, despite historicist claims of rejecting psychoanalysis. Considers works by major…
Scala, Elizabeth.
Elizabeth Scala and Sylvia Federico, eds. The Post-Historical Middle Ages ((New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 191-214.
Indicts the "patrilineal logic by which the [masculine] gender of historicism is perpetuated and reproduced," surveying how recent publications in medieval studies (especially Chaucer studies) embody the structures of the "patriarchal family."
Scala, Elizabeth.
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 31 (2009): 81-108.
In Lacanian terms, WBT and ClT reveal "what each speaker seems most desperate to deny." Ideas of sovereignty ("self-determination"), mastery ("control over another"), and the desires they help to constitute are parallel in the Tales. So are the…
In striving to contextualize the portrait of the Yeoman in relation to real-world late medieval weaponry and hunting gear, critics overlook both the Yeoman's service as the "bearer" of aristocratic masculinity and the portrait's phallic humor. In…
Scala, Elizabeth.
Claire Vial, ed. 'Gode is the lay, swete is the note': Résonances dans les lais bretons moyen-anglais / Echoes in the Middle English Breton Lays (2014): n.p. (web publication).
Argues that Chaucer's interest in Breton lays rests on the genre's association with magic and language. WBT has features of a Breton lay, but is not marked as such; FranT, even though it has its sources in the Italian novelle, is marked as a Breton…
Scala, Elizabeth.
Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2015.
Presents Lacanian analysis of desire in CT that focuses on the "circulation of the signifier" and the generative power of misrecognition/misreading. Clarifies the meaning and function of fundamental concepts (subject, signifier, Other, aggressivity,…
Scala, Elizabeth.
Word & Image 26.4 (2010): 381–92.
Shows that the Nun's Priest is often illustrated in manuscripts and books, even though he is not described in the GP, arguing that the illustrations are informed by the Host's comments on the Priest and by the description of the protagonist of NPT,…
Scala, Elizabeth.
Chaucer on Screen: Absence, Presence, and Adapting the "Canterbury Tales" (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2016), pp. 19-32.
Assesses how Brian Helgeland's "A Knight's Tale" and John Madden's "Shakespeare in Love" "tell us more than they realize": that Chaucer always stands separate from his fiction and, conversely, that Shakespeare's "theatrical life" enables us to…
Scala, Elizabeth.
Marion Turner, ed. A Handbook of Middle English Studies (Chichester: Wiley, 2013), pp. 49-62.
Argues that "Desire-as-impasse is the human condition" in KnT, exploring how readers' "reading backward" from the end of the tale--seeking to fulfill the "desire for signification"--parallels the efforts of Arcite and Palamon to articulate their own…
Scala, Elizabeth.
Texas Studies in Literature and Language 59 (2017): 137-61.
Argues that FranT provided the "raw material and structures of dramatic feeling" for Shakespeare's "Cymbeline," encouraging critics to adopt a more expansive view of source relations, and observing how and where the tale and the play illuminate each…
Scala, Elizabeth.
In The Open Access Companion to the Canterbury Tales. https://opencanterburytales.dsl.lsu.edu, 2017. Relocated 2025 at https://opencanterburytales.lsusites.org/
Explores the "conflict and friction" of GP as a stand-alone tale, also reading it forward to the following tales and backward from them. Designed for pedagogical use, includes several questions for discussion.
Scala, Elizabeth.
Frank Grady, ed. The Cambridge Companion to "The Canterbury Tales" (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), pp. 105-20.
Explains how the Wife of Bath dominates not only her own material in WBPT, but also CT as a whole. Discusses generic expectations for the Wife and her handling of biblical and classical material, to demonstrate that she represents "an irreducibly…
Offers comprehensive introduction to CT, focusing on language, genres, forms, historical background, and critical history related to Chaucer. Provides exercises, strategies, and ideas for teaching Chaucer in undergraduate courses.
Scala, Elizabeth.
Notes and Queries 266 (2021): 255-58.
Explores intertextual relations among versions of the Virginia / Virginius story (by Livy, Bersuire, Gower, and Chaucer), focusing on how the depiction of Virginia's mother in both Gower and Chaucer "offers a broader semblance of propriety by…
Reflects on practical and theoretical issues in teaching CT, especially the usefulness (or not) of translations, glossaries, dictionaries, and the Norton edition of the work. Includes personal reminiscences.
Scanlon, Larry, and James Simpson, eds.
Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006.
An introduction by the editors and eleven essays by various authors seek to vitalize Lydgate studies, exploring the status of poet laureate, Lydgate's poetic style, his political poetry, and a number of literary poems and forms (e.g., mumming,…
Scanlon, Larry.
R. A. Shoaf, ed. Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde: "Subgit to alle Poesye": Essays in Criticism. Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, no. 104. Pegasus Paperbacks, no. 10 (Binghamton, N.Y.: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1992), pp. 211-23.
Explains Fortune as a figure that embodies historical flux and affirms aristocratic privilege. In TC, references to Fortune do not provide a philosophical norm against which to test the attitudes of the characters; the references assert politically…
The central question for NPT is not whether it is allegorical or ironic but how it uses allegory and irony to refigure its own past. This tale was composed for a court audience at the beginning of a new vernacular tradition. What kind of authority…
Scanlon, Larry.
Dissertation Abstracts International 48 (1987): 387A.
Originating as a device of classical rhetoric, the exemplum became a genre in its own right through the church. Preachers brought it to a lay audience, and poets (Gower, Chaucer, Hoccleve, and Lydgate) eventually secularized it in various ways.
