Six related essays on the interaction of words and images in English literary tradition: a theoretical introduction, plus essays on the Ruthwell Cross, Anglo-Saxon art, the Auchinleck and Vernon manuscripts, the manuscript of "Pearl," and the…
MacDonald, Paul S.
Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2003.
Includes a chapter entitled "Mind and Soul in English from Chaucer to Shakespeare" (pp. 245-78) that surveys the denotations and connotations of the words "soul" and "mind," with examples drawn a range of authors, including Chaucer.
Includes a study that details the bibliographical and physical instability of two variants of the 1542 Chaucer edition--the Reynes imprint and the Bonham imprint--as they exist in the Hoe, the Chew, and the Hagen-Clark copies, paying particular…
Eyler, Joshua R., ed.
Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2010.
Fourteen essays by various authors on topics ranging from Old English and Icelandic sagas to early modern Spanish literature and Shakespeare's "Richard III." The volume includes an introduction by the editor, an index, and a cumulative bibliography.…
Kelly, Henry Ansgar.
Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2010.
Reprints twelve of Kelly's studies that pertain to Chaucer and his historical contexts, with an introduction, some addenda and corrigenda, and a cumulative index. The essays are reproduced in their original typefaces and with their original…
Reprints twenty-two of Burrow's essays on fourteenth- and fifteenth-century poetry, including several on Chaucer. Individual essays retain their original pagination.
Braswell, Mary Flowers.
Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2016
New York: Routledge, 2017.
A critical biography of Haweis that emphasizes her work as a Chaucer scholar, critic, editor, and illustrator, explaining her accomplishments in relation to the better-known Chaucerians of the nineteenth century and exploring why her influence is not…
Defines medieval romance as a narrative (usually poetic) that follows a hero's encounters with "love, ladies, and adventures, culminating in a happy ending." Whetter explores these features in Middle English romances, particularly Malory's "Morte…
Bloomfield Morton W.
Burns, Norman T., and Christopher J. Reagan, eds. Concepts of the Hero in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: Papers of the Fourth and Fifth Annual Conferences of the Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, State University of New York at Binghamton, 2-3 May 1970, 1-2 May 1971 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1975), pp. 27-48.
Documents the "absence of a true charismatic hero who is valiant and noble" in the literature of medieval western Europe, commenting on a wide variety of works, including those by Chaucer, and attributing the late-medieval "retreat from heroism" to a…
Boitani, Piero, and Anna Torti, eds.
Bury St. Edmunds, Suffolk: D. S. Brewer, 1991.
Examines theory and practice of poetics in medieval English literature, including author-centered, text-centered, and modern theoretical approaches.
For individual essays that pertain to Chaucer, search for Poetics: Theory and Practice in Medieval…
Cable, Thomas.
C. B. McCully and J. J. Anderson, eds. English Historical Metrics (Cambridge and New York : Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 7-29.
Cable traces a pattern of development in English stress "clashing," affected by stress subordination and stress spacing. Chaucer's "alternating metre has frequent stress subordination, but it is less clear that it makes systematic use of stress…
Youmans, Gilbert.
C. B. McCully and J. J. Anderson, eds. English Historical Metrics (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 185-209.
Reexamines Halle and Keyser's three principles of the iambic line as applied to Chaucer's verse, arguing that the verse is better explained by a prototypical hierarchy of stresses than by a pattern of alternating weak and strong stresses. Kiparsky's…
Duffell, Martin J.
C. B. McCully and J. J. Anderson, eds. English Historical Metrics (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 210-18.
Surveys the development and scholarship of hendecasyllabic meter, identifying the innovations whereby Chaucer produced the first English iambic pentamenter and Gower experimented with variable caesura in hendecasyllabic lines to produce Anglo-Norman…
Duggan, Hoyt N.
C. B. McCully and J. J. Anderson, eds. English Historical Metrics. (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996): pp. 219-37.
Comments on Dryden's and Tyrwhitt's views of Chaucer's meter as background to assessing editorial treatments of the meter of "Pearl." Argues that editors need to emend the manuscript of "Pearl" more aggressively to minimize scribal interventions and…
Caon, Luisella.
C. C. Barfoot, ed. "And Never Know the Joy": Sex and the Erotic in English Poetry (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2006), pp. 33-47.
Chaucer's uses of thou and ye pronouns "systematically" indicate the "degree of closeness or distance" between lovers in CT, indicating not only formality and informality but also intensity of emotion and shifts in attitudes. Caon surveys previous…
Collette, Carolyn (P.)
C. David Benson and Elizabeth Robertson, eds. Chaucer's Religious Tales (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1990), 95-107.
Similar in context and form, SNT and PrT have evoked critical commentary on historical background, sources, and analogues. However, PrT has sparked more consistent and recent interest, in part because of the Prioress's personality, her relationship…
Benson, C. David.
C. David Benson and Elizabeth Robertson, eds. Chaucer's Religious Tales (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1990), pp. 1-7.
Darwinian, Freudian, and Marxist approaches to CT have "obscure(d) the historical and intellectual context of the religious tales" (Mel, ParsT, ClT, MLT, PrT, SNT), making them the "most marginalized" of Chaucer's works. Articles in the…
Keiser, George R.
C. David Benson and Elizabeth Robertson, eds. Chaucer's Religious Tales (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1990), pp. 121-36.
In MLT, Chaucer exploited "contemporary taste for stories of beleaguered and pathetic heroines," simultaneously appropriating conventions from his sources and manipulating them to evoke stronger than usual emotional and intellectual responses.
Benson, C. David.
C. David Benson and Elizabeth Robertson, eds. Chaucer's Religious Tales (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1990), pp. 137-44.
Not all of Chaucer's religious tales are alike. In MLT and ClT, Chaucer "transforms the same basic material into two radically different, though equally valid, varieties of religious poetry." A religious romance, MLT "employs great rhetorical…
Robertson, Elizabeth, ed.
C. David Benson and Elizabeth Robertson, eds. Chaucer's Religious Tales (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1990), pp. 145-60.
Robertson encourages feminist critics to confront "the complexities of the relationship between women and religion" in Chaucer's religious tales, for "what appear in these tales to be extremes of female suffering and violence against women are…
Nolan, Barbara.
C. David Benson and Elizabeth Robertson, eds. Chaucer's Religious Tales (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1990), pp. 21-38.
The "special quality" of MLT, ClT, PrT and SNT is their focus on spiritual transcendence rather than simply religious or moral values. All four tales "reveal exactly the same incandescent core of prayerful faith and spiritual aspiration presented…
Georgianna, Linda.
C. David Benson and Elizabeth Robertson, eds. Chaucer's Religious Tales (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1990), pp. 55-69.
Focusing on such critics as Thomas Lounsbury, E. Talbot Donaldson, D. W. Robertson, John Fleming, and Derek Pearsall, Georgianna suggests that twentieth-century scholars, like their sixteenth-century predecessor John Foxe, have constructed a…
Edwards, A. S. G.
C. David Benson and Elizabeth Robertson, eds. Chaucer's Religious Tales (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1990), pp. 85-94.
Noting that MLT has often been apologized for or ignored, Edwards surveys critical approaches to the tale: the date of its composition, its place in the Canterbury sequence, source study, biography, narrative voice, the problem of Constance,…
Cowgill, Jane.
C. David Benson and Elizabeth Robertson, eds. Chaucer's Religious Tales (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1990). pp. 171-83.
Like MLT, SNT, ClT, and WBT, Mel employs a feminine style of persuasion. Prudence "demonstrates" the values she counsels her husband to abide by, thus adding actions to arguments as means of persuasion and subverting the male hierarchy. ParsT, by…
Morse, Charlotte C.
C. David Benson and Elizabeth Robertson, eds. Chaucer's Religious Tales (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1990), no. 130), pp. 71-83.
Between 1910 and 1952, attitudes toward ClT were overtly hostile. Since 1952, however, criticism has been "apologetic in nature," with teacher-critics constructing "Christian allegorical," philosophical, psychological, and political readings "to…
