Browse Items (16470 total)

An autobiographical reading of WBPT by a woman who was for a time an abused wife. Black records three different responses to Chaucer's materials at three different stages in her life, focusing on the Wife's responses to abuse by her husbands.

In narratives of falsely accused queens, the queens frequently undergo periods of exile that refine their souls through poverty and suffering. Black compares the Constance narratives by Nicholas Trevet, Gower, and Chaucer, examining each version in…

Parody is the key to understanding the relation between Chaucer's comedy and Christianity. Through parody Chaucer achieves high seriousness and high comedy. Parody of sacral sign and symbols in PardT and Marriage Group produces poetry that can be…

MilT 3589-92 alludes to Matt. 5:27-30, where Christ condemns lechery, using the images of hand and eye. Chaucer uses the same imagery to condemn the lecher Nicholas, whose punishment is to be burned a "hand-brede aboute" his "nether ye." The same…

Brief summary of Ricardian literature and contemporary social and political events. Mentions Gower's works, "Piers Plowman," "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," and Chaucer's works, especially GP and WBPT.

Although the Reeve claims a moral high ground by telling a story that deals out justice to its dishonest miller, this revenge does not accord with the moral virtue of justice nor with the amoral fabliau genre, undermining the Reeve's sanctimony and…

Examines in KnT the rhetorical and thematic concerns with order, choice, and the difficulties of achieving resolution. Reads Palamon and Arcite as a balanced pair, and Theseus as a figure of the limited human ability to avert fortune and determine…

Critiques Root's and Windeatt's editions of TC for their lack of a clear and consistent theory of textual transmission and explores the problems of producing a valid edition of CT, exposing difficulties by examining the limitations of the Riverside…

Closer attention to external and internal evidence should make scholars more cautious about accepting as canonical such passages as NPE, BD 31-96, Ret, and the lists of Chaucerian works in MLT and LGWP.

An anonymous version of "Reynard the Fox" of 1706 contains a hitherto unnoticed allusion to Chaucer's KnT.

Almost all studies of Middle English language and style are flawed in method or lacking in comprehensiveness. The reaction of the medieval audience to dialectal differences is hard to gauge; e.g., sociolinguistic implications of the Northern dialect…

The textual tradition shows that the major and perhaps sole manuscript used by Thynne lacked lines 31-96. The borrowings from the French alleged by Helen Phillips for this passage are commonplaces. No reliable evidence proves that Chaucer composed…

By manuscript evidence Blake justifies his position that of CT only what appears in Hengwrt can be attributed to Chaucer. He attributes all the early manuscripts to a single copy text assembled from Chaucer's own copies after his death. For best…

The lack of a clearcut distinction between connotative and denotative associations of words, as well as the looseness of syntactical patterns in Middle English, forces us to focus on the rhetorical arrangement of ideas and words--repetition, balance,…

Refutes Benson's view (SAC 3 (1981), pp. 77-120) that Ellesmere represents Chaucer's final arrangement of CT. Like Manly and Rickert, Blake thinks there is no Chaucerian order and that after Chaucer's death scribes tried to achieve a satisfactory…

Endings may have been lost for HF and other works. The thesis that works were abandoned by Chaucer leads to untenable theories that Chaucer lost his patronage or became bored or dissatisfied.

On Manly-Rickert's faulty assumptions: prior circulation of individual tales among Chaucer's friends; two archetypes, O and O1; individual lines of textual transmission for separate tales; scribal use of several lost exemplars for some tales. It is…

Manuscript evidence suggests Chaucer's developing conception of the Wife in her GP portrait, the shorter prologue found in some MSS, the tale, and references made in ClT, MerT, and Buk. Some passage were added to WBT at a later date.

Studies based uncritically upon the Robinson text may have produced questionable readings in CT: KnT, ParsT and Prol, ClT, ShT, GP, RvT, MilT, NPT. The Hengwrt MS, currently being used for the "Variorum Chaucer" and by Blake, is the earliest…

Most if not all early scribes used Hg, which avoided editorial tampering--i. e., introduction of new tales and links, revision of order of tales, "corrections" of lines, words, spellings. "The best an editor can do is follow Hg closely."

Nothing in the textual tradition of the three MSS of BD supports a thesis of differing exemplars. The lines of BD that are found in Thynne's edition but not in the MSS--lines 31-96, 288,480, 886--should be considered spurious until convincingly…

None of the structural orders that critics have strained to produce are totally satisfactory for a poem in such an obviously fragmentary state as CT by an author whose plans and intentions are as enigmatic as Chaucer's.

Argues that Caxton's two editions of CT were prompted by patrons; that the revision of the text from the first to the second edition was a "haphazard affair"; and that Caxton's published remarks on Chaucer are conventional and economically motivated,…

El is based on Hg, the first published text. Hg arranged the thirteen apparently unrelated fragments of the one copytext left by Chaucer not by geographical and chronological features which exercise modern critics but by a sequence of…

Twice the carpenter in MilT uses "astromye": is it a malapropism, an acceptable variant, or a scribal error? Since according to Manly-Rickert all mss of CT record "astromye," the last of these is not tenable. And since the word thus misused does…