The Merchant's language snares the reader into displaying bad taste. It accomplishes this by making May a sympathetic character and by allowing the reader to belong to a select group which sees through the deceptions of the tale. However, the…
LGW illustrates the importance of fidelity to one's pledges. Chaucer shows that "act, speech, and writing, when captured by image, text, and imagination, preserve love beyond its transitory moment of existence" (50). The written experiences of the…
Schmerling, Hilda L.
New York: Gordon Presss, 1977.
In a section called "Springtime in the Canterbury Tales: Chaucer's Inheritance of the Sacred and the Profane" (pp. 1-26), tallies a number of classical and medieval attitudes toward spring and comments on Chaucer's various allusions to and images of…
Schmidt-Hidding, Wolfgang.
Heidelberg: Quelle & Meyer, 1959.
Opens with a chapter on Chaucer (pp. 9-35)--followed by ones about William Shakespeare, Henry Fielding, Thomas Sterne, Charles Lamb, Charles Dickens, and Mark Twain--surveying his self-portraits, narrative poses, characterizations, ironies, and the…
Schmidt, A. V. C.
Essays in Criticism 26 (1976): 99-115.
The solemn tone of an unusually learned vocabulary, the skillful syntax, and the architectural strength of the ababbcbc eight-line unit combine to give Chaucer's "image of regret" in "Form Age" what Joseph Campbell calls the "force of living myth"
Schmidt considers Langland's "attitude to the moral and artistic demands of his poem," his versecraft, his use of medieval Latin quotations and works on the art of poetry, and his diction, puns, and rhetorical art. Contains brief references to…
Nimrod ("Nembrot") is the only biblical figure in "The Former Age." The detail that he designed the Tower of Babel is traditional, but Chaucer's reference in this poem seems to be derived directly from Walafrid Strabo's "Glossa Ordinaria."
Schmidt, A. V. C.
Essays in Criticism 19 (1969): 107-17.
Argues that KnT is "mainly about" the tragedy of Arcite rather than the success of Palamon. The latter mistakes both the nature of Emelye and the rivalry of Arcite, who is a "worthier" man. Like Troilus, Arcite falls in fortune, and ultimately fails…
Schmidt, A. V. C.
Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015.
Collection of published and previously unpublished studies of Chaucer and other writers, including the "Pearl"-poet, Hopkins, Yeats, Eliot, Jones, and Auden. Part 1, "Medieval: Chaucer and the Gawain-Poet," includes essays on Bo, Form Age, KnT, and…
Schmidt, A. V. C.
Notes and Queries 212 (1967): 230-31.
Using evidence from WBPT, challenges D. S. Silvia's argument (N&Q 1967: 8-10; same title) that the Wife of Bath has lost interest in Jankyn and is looking for husband number six.
Schmidt, Gary D.
Anne C. Hargrove and Maurine Magliocco, eds. Portraits of Marriage in Literature (Macomb: Western Illinois University, 1984), pp. 97-105.
Chaucer uses enfolding irony in MerT and FranT to examine the good marriage, with insights on courtly love and adultery through shifting perspectives and character conflict.
Schmidt, Gary, and Susan M. Felch, eds.
Woodstock, Ver.: Skylight Paths, 2006.
This anthology of poems, stories, essays, and excerpts that celebrate spring includes lines 1-18 of GP, in modern translation, with a brief introduction to pilgrimage and the CT.
A history of international English poetry, with recurrent attention to the history of the language, verse forms and style, political contours, and the anxieties of influence. The structure is chronological until the twentieth century, when Schmidt…
Considers theories of the nature of the Old Man in PardT, suggesting that he might be thought to combine feature of the Good Angel and the Bad Angel of medieval mystery and morality plays insofar as he seems to be "extra-human," advising and…
Schmitt, Jean-Claude.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.
An exemplum of Stephen of Bourbon, written sometime before 1261, reveals and condemns an odd heresy. Near Lyons, a story has gained currency of a greyhound, slain by its noble master in ill-considered haste, after it had saved the knight's infant…
Schmitz, Gotz.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
English translation, with a new preface, of Die Frauenklage: Studies zur englischen Verserzahlung in der englischen Literature des Spatmittelalter und der Renaissance (Tubingen: Niemeyer, 1984). Investigates the relations between subject matter and…
Schneider, Paul Stephen.
Chaucer Review 11 (1977): 201-09.
In ShT money corrupts marriage and brotherhood, but it effects a relationship between the merchant and his wife. Hence money is both good and evil, but its effects are unpredictable.
Schneider, Thomas R.
Dissertation Abstracts International A75.05 (2014): n.p.
Studies physical motion, readerly motion, and other motions related to texts in late medieval English literature, including a chapter on Chaucer's "engagement with motion as a concept in natural philosophy" in HF and PF, connecting it with the…
Schneider, Thomas R.
In James L. Smith, ed. The Passenger: Medieval Texts and Transits ([Santa Barbara, Calif.]: Punctum, 2017), pp. 115-29.
Addresses "Chaucer's engagement with the concept of movement" in HF, exploring how three scenes of motion (the eagle's descent, the eagle's lecture on movement and sound, and the whirling House of Rumor) engage with William of Ockham's "Brevis summa…
Schoeck, R. J.
University of Toronto Quarterly 23 (1954):185-92.
Develops an allusion to Chaucer building a "house of Fame" in Gerard Legh's "Accedence of Armorie" (1562) and combines it with Chaucer's "connections with" the Inner Temple to suggest that the poet may have written HF "for one of ritualistic…
Schoeck, R[ichard] J.
Florilegium 11(1992): 124-40.
In TC, ironic effects are achieved through a rich exploration of a variety of rhetorical devices that create a complicated interplay between speaker, subject, and audience.
