Browse Items (16472 total)

Explores how Abelard, Chaucer, and Langland used consolatory narratives in their writings. Chapter 5 (pp. 107-27) explores Augustinian and Boethian concerns in KnT.

Interprets the biblical allusions and references in MerT as Chaucer's invitation to his audience to "consider the ethics of appropriating morally authoritative texts." The narrator, January, and May manipulate textual authority in various ways,…

Assesses how the invocation to the "yevere of the formes" (2228ff.) that opens the "Legend of Philomela" in LGW contributes to the "primary rhetorical effect" of the legend, i.e.,"secondary pathos." As an appeal to an absent god, the invocation, like…

Finds Chaucer turning in MilT from classical sources and subject matter in works such as TC, LGW, and KnT, to biblical resources throughout CT. Like the Miller and Nicholas, Chaucer draws on "the cultural authority of the Bible by means of its…

Examines biblical images, allusions, themes, and narrative patterns in MilPT, exploring various ways that the Miller and Nicholas appropriate the Bible's "authority for personal rhetorical ends." Chaucer's providence-like control of his material is…

Argues that January's foolish fantasy is MerT "is a version" of the Merchant's own, tracing the teller's "increasingly ambivalent attitude" toward his character "from detachment to attack." In January, the Merchant "tries to destroy his former self,"…

With Chaucer's Criseyde (as with Malory's Guinevere), readers are forced to construct her character from the "implicature" of her acts and words rather than deduce it from explicit and consistent statements.

Traces the development of Yeats's concern with "writing for a listening audience," and identifies his reading of Chaucer in 1905 as crucial to this process. As several of his letters and lectures attest, Yeats for a time regarded Chaucer as the…

Argues that ekphrasis in MerT is an "engagement with the union of language and the inner senses." In particular, examines "ekphrastic moments . . . between physical expression and the psyche" in Chaucer's treatment of marriage in MerT.

One of the best and earliest observations of the basic distortion of history with regard to women and their roles is made by the Wife of Bath (III, 688-96). Christine de Pisan makes a comparable but more elaborate statement of the mistreatment of…

On Chaucer's fifteenth- and sixteenth-century reputation as magus and master of alchemy.

Schultz critiques uses of "heterosexual" as a term and as an ahistorical concept in queer studies of medieval literature. Chaucerian critics (and others) use the term in ways that "distort the very object" of their studies, "thwart" history, and…

A universal theme of metamorphosis, compelled or voluntary, relates to both the natural mutability of human life and the boundaries and hierarchies set by society, as shown in four texts ranging from KnT (Actaeon) through Gower's Ovidian passages,…

Revised reprint of 1966 original; a description of the Ellesmere manuscript, its illuminations, and its history. Includes a new "Bibliographical Note" by Joseph A. Dane and Seth Lerer, plus their additions to Schulz's list of reproductions of…

Describes the Ellesmere manuscript, with particular attention to the illustrations of the pilgrims (here reproduced), the program of semi-vinet illumination, and the "Portrait of Chaucer." Also includes a description of the manuscript's text of CT, a…

In TC Chaucer employs a series of circular images--rings, city walls, seasonal cycles, Fortune's wheel, and super-lunar spheres--to reinforce his themes of sexual love, imprisonment, and ephemerality, and to accentuate the differences between earthly…

In CT, sentences are interlinked. Structures are repeated: MilT is a bawdy version of KnT; RvT, a nasty version of MilT. The structure may reflect interlinked concepts in the Great Chain of Being.

The magical pageant of the Briton clerk (FranT) is imitated in Shakespeare's masque of Ceres ("The Tempest"); Humbert Humbert ("Lolita") is an analogue of Prospero. The image of the magician in each work points to the activity of the creative artist…

NPT establishes an idea of decorum or appropriateness as a philosophical/theological context for the marriage tales. The central themes of the tale is that happiness and virtue derive from recognizing one's place in the Great Chain of Being.

Language itself is important in FranT, but so is the intention of the speaker. Moreover, authorial intention in CT as a whole affects how we use language for our own ends, because we learn from everything we read. Authors must consider consequences…

Discusses "the narrator's rhetoric of pity," alluding to Augustine, Aristotle, Cicero, and others, while arguing that both pity and poetry involve "a kind of authentic inauthenticity" that is unstable, paradoxical, and contingent in LGW.

Examines relations between theology and economics in FrPT and SumPT (with glances at WBP and PardPT), focusing on the polysemous implications of debt, and suggesting that these tales are "key source texts" for modern "economic theology" (Weber to…

Considers representations of the Flemish in such works as "Piers Plowman," the Paston letters, and CT, with a particular eye toward the use of negative stereotypes and the use of Flemish people as an Other for the purpose of developing an English…

Includes an account of the making and reception of Pier Paolo Pasolini's films "The Decameron" (1971) and "Canterbury Tales" (1972). In the latter, Pasolini plays Chaucer and includes seven "Tales": Merchant's,Franklin's, Cook's, Miller's "Wife of…

Argues that the Wife of Bath is a distant source (not necessarily intentional) for the characterization of Molly Bloom in James Joyce's "Ulysses." Both characters are sensual, hedonistic, heterodox, touched by despair, shrewish, and unfaithful--part…