Cheney, Patrick.
Curtis Perry and John Watkins, eds. Shakespeare and the Middle Ages (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 103-25.
Cheney examines how Shakespeare's "The Phoenix and Turtle" echoes PF, particularly as "a poem about the politics of authorship." As a "great poet of self-crowning," Spenser responds to Chaucer's self-effacing pursuit of fame. Shakespeare sets these…
Knight, Stephen.
James Bothwell, P. J. P. Goldberg, and W. M. Ormrod, eds. The Problem of Labour in Fourteenth-Century England (Woodbridge, Suffolk; and Rochester, N.Y.: York Medieval Press, 2000), pp. 101-22.
Knight considers Chaucer's Plowman (among other figures) in an effort to construct a "structure of feeling" pertinent to late-medieval English labor. As in the mystery plays and in Piers Plowman, the depiction of labor in CT is first idealized, then…
An examination of "wit" and its near synonyms provides a control for the study of terms of cognition. Bo discards native words such as "understanding" and "knowing," in favor of Romance words such as "intelligence" and "science." These latter terms…
Partridge, Stephen.
English Manuscript Studies, 1100-1700 03 (1992): 29-37.
Compares the vocabulary and style of Equat, Astr, and other contemporary scientific treatises, concluding that variations between Equat and Astr cast doubt on Chaucer's authorship of the former.
Koster, Josephine A.
T. L. Burton and John F. Plummer, eds. "Seyd in Forme and Reverence": Essays on Chaucer and Chaucerians in Memory of Emerson Brown, Jr. (Provo, Utah: Chaucer Studio Press, 2005), pp. 35-45.
Reads WBP as an example of genre-bending: a parody of female saints' lives. Surveys Chaucer's uses of the conventions of female hagiography in CT and argues that Alison of Bath "acts in precisely the opposite way to an orthodox saint." The essay…
Hilmo, Maidie.
Susanna Fein and David Raybin, eds. Chaucer: Visual Approaches (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016), pp. 218-43.
Studies the interplay between textual content and "mise-en-page" in the Ellesmere MS of CT, especially its use of gold, border ornament, decorated letters, and glosses. Such elements shape an integrated experience of the text, duly "sanitized and…
Of the sixteen extant manuscripts of TC, the organization of the Morgan, Corpus Christi, and St. John's shows the greatest concern for both readers and listeners of the fifteenth century.
Machan, Tim.
Herbert Schendl and Laura Wright, eds. Code-Switching in Early English (Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 2011), pp. 303-34.
Describes various ways that scribes used "visual pragmatics" (i.e., "bibliographic codes like rubrication, illumination, underscoring and so forth") to indicate code-switching in late medieval English literary manuscripts. Includes a comment on the…
Stanbury, Sarah.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008.
Stanbury describes late medieval English attitudes toward images, icons, and devotion, exploring how the tensions among these attitudes are represented in art and literature. Reformist distrust of images co-existed with newly intensified devotional…
Mote, Sarah.
Yuichiro Azuma, Kotaro Kawasaki, and Koichi Kano, eds. Chaucer and English and American Literature: Essays Commemorating the Retirement of Professor Masatoshi Kawasaki (Tokyo: Kinseido, 2015), pp. 60–74.
Provides brief descriptions of the fourteenth-century history and the life of Chaucer, and introduces late fourteenth-century visual arts, including illuminated manuscripts, stained glasses, and altarpieces with notable examples. Characterizes the…
Argues that medieval allegory and "much of science fiction" share a common "presupposition" of conveying an "abstract message" or "vision of truth," comparing various themes and devices of science fiction with examples drawn from medieval…
Addresses the "existence of a tradition that attributes 'Piers Plowman' to Chaucer." Surveys notes and items that contribute to Chaucer's and Langland's "reception histories."
Vitto, Cindy L.
Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1989.
Treats the debate over the problem of salvation for the virtuous pagan and the solutions of theologians in the medieval Church and then concentrates on Dante, "St. Erkenwald," and "Piers Plowman."
Beadle, Richard.
Ruth Morse and Barry Windeatt, eds. Chaucer Traditions: Studies in Honour of Derek Brewer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990) pp. 213-33.
In 1635, Sir Francis Kinaston published a translation into Latin verse of the first two books of Chaucer's TC under the title "Amorum Troili et Creseidae libri duo priores Anglico-Latini". This is best described as a parallel-text edition,for a…
Blake, N. F.
Loren C. Gruber, ed. Essays on Old, Middle, Modern English and Old Icelandic in Honor of Raymond P. Tripp, Jr. (Lewiston, N.Y.: Mellen Press, 2000), pp. 361-86.
Concludes that either the virgule replicates Chaucer's own mark, or its rather uniform placement signals a scribal practice not yet fully understood.
Killough, George (B.)
Dissertation Abstracts International 39 (1979): 5496A.
Virgule placement in the Hengwrt and Ellesmere mss. is highly regular. Syntactic and metrical rules can be used to predict 80 percent of the placements. The two mss agree in virgule placement 77 percent of the time. The 23 percent rate of…
Wogan-Browne, Jocelyn.
Ruth Evans and Lesley Johnson, eds. Feminist Readings in Middle English Literature: The Wife of Bath and All Her Sect (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 165-94.
The early Middle English "Letter on Virginity" and the "Katherine Group" saints' lives critique male desire and the violation of female will, challenging conventions of courtly love. In WBP, SNT, and PhyT, Chaucer's use of "virginity material"…
Robbins, Rossell Hope.
Kibler, William W., ed. Eleanor of Aquitaine: Patron and Politician (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1976), pp. 147-72.
Surveys the density and intensity of French influence on the literature of medieval England, focusing on courtly romance and how its plots and "interest in love's finesse" affected the English tradition separately. Outlines some possible connections…
Although allegorical and historical justifications have been given for Griselda's suffering in ClT, the story is Chaucer's attack on the tyranny and injustice of her situation. In a different way, Webster condemns tyrannical persecution in the…
Barber, Charles,and Nicolas Barber.
Leeds Studies in English 21 (1990): 81-101.
Through a computer count of the syllabic length of 15,294 verses of CT, Barber challenges J. G. Southworth's hypothesis that unstresses final "-e" was not pronounced in Chaucer's verse. The results suggest that syllabic symmetry could have been…
Vulic, Kathryn.
Susanna Fein and David Raybin, eds. Chaucer: Visual Approaches (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016), pp. 59-85.
Posits that the Paternoster diagram in the Vernon manuscript, transcribed in an appendix, as an example of a "supplementary text" that performs devotional work in dialogue with ParsT's call to prayer. Examines the visual and verbal structure of the…
Loomis, Dorothy Bethurum,
James L. Rosier, ed. Philological Essays: Studies in Old and Middle English Language and Literature in Honour of Herbert Dean Meritt (The Hague: Mouton, 1970), pp. 182-95.
Argues that Chaucer "was deeply influenced by the Platonism of the School of Chartres," focusing on how he and Alanus "treated the figure of Venus." Alanus presents Venus as "the efficient cause of creation," and while this view is mediated for…
