Chaucer refers to popular uprisings in the Monk's legend of Nero and in NPT. Jack Straw was a title used in springtime games in England, and the rebellion he reputedly led may have stemmed largely from popular ritual.
Simola, Robert, compiler.
https://chaucereditions.wordpress.com/ (n.d.; last accessed 01/29/2019)
Organizes links to illustrations from editions of Chaucer's works published between 1484 (Caxton's 2d ed.) and 1930. The images are "listed chronologically by either editor, illustrator, title, or author depending on the source," all derived from…
Simola, Robert, trans. and illus.
Templeton, Calif.: William and Geoffrey Press, 2022.
Facing-page translation of GP into modern English iambic decasyllables; features illustrations of the pilgrims--reproductions of Caxton's woodcuts paired with original woodcut portraits--and an extensive glossary.
Simon-Jones, Lindsey, Derrick Pitard, and Krista Sue-Lo Twu
Year's Work in English Studies 99 (2020): 292-312.
A discursive bibliography of Chaucer studies for 2018, divided into six subcategories: general, CT, TC, LGW, other works, and reputation and reception.
Simon, Jean Robert, trans.
Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, 1970.
French translation of selections from TC (Book 1: 155-230, 268-322, 400-504; Book 2: 289-490, 596-812; Book 3: 239-343, 694-798, 841-952, 1065-1148, 1184-1211, 1226-53, 1275-1323; Book 4: 1128-1281, 1534-96, 1640-1701; Book 5: 197-266, 295-321,…
Simonin, Olivier.
Bulletin des Anglicistes Medievistes 87 (2015): 123–44.
Explores the notion of commitment in "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" and briefly mentions MilT in relation to the several meanings of the term "hend(e)."
Simons, Christopher E. J.
Humanities: Christianity and Culture (International Christian University) 41 (2013): 31-70.
Clarifies what kind of poems William Wordsworth criticized as "idle and extravagant stories in verse" and examines four English narrative poems before Wordsworth, including WBT. All four turn out to be more or less "idle and extravagant" by…
Simons, John.
Literature and History, 2d ser., 1, no. 2 (1990): 4-12.
Shows how close is the "bond between literary culture and the ideology and practice of domination enshrined in judicial controls" in late-medieval England after the Black Death. Summarizes statues of labor, taxation, and responses to the Uprising of…
Simons, Rita Dandridge.
College Language Association Journal 12 (1968): 77-83.
Identifies details in the GP description of the Prioress that are inconsistent with the Benedictine Rule and indicate satirically that she is courtly, a "worldly woman dressed in a Prioress's habit."
Adaptation of selections from CT, intended for young adolescents. Selections include GP, KnT, MLT, portions of MkT, NPT, WBPT, FrT, SumT, ClT, FranT, PardPT, CYT, and Ret, each accompanied by prompts for discussion. The volume also includes a brief…
Simpson, James
Piero Boitani and Jill Mann, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Chaucer, 2d ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003), pp. 251-69.
Changes in literary practice in the late fifteenth century helped modify reception of Chaucer's works. Remembered as a personal figure to be reckoned with by Hoccleve and Lydgate, Chaucer--like his works--was later objectified in the "philological"…
Simpson, James.
Essays and Studies 39 (1986): 1-18.
The eagle in HF, pt. 2, with its immediate source in Dante's "Purgatorio," also parallels a passage in the "De vulgari eloquentia" (2.4) that cautions poets not to follow the "astripetam aquilam" ("star-seeking eagle"). The eagle is a parody of the…
Simpson, James.
Piero Boitani and Anna Torti, eds. Interpretation: Medieval and Modern (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1993), pp. 167-87.
Refashions the Neo-Platonic "Timaean" aesthetic proposed by Jordan (Cambridge, 1967), focusing on the painting imagery used by Alain de Lille in his discussion of the creative acts of God, Nature, and writers. Despite Jordan's claims for the…
Simpson, James.
Helen Cooper and Sally Mapstone, eds. The Long Fifteenth Century: Essays for Douglas Gray (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), pp. 15-33.
Reads Lydgate's "Destruction" as a Canterbury tale and a "pre-text" to KnT. Set historically before KnT, Lydgate's poem expands the boundaries of Chaucer's poem but "forecloses" its "limited possibilities for constructive human activity."
Simpson, James.
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 20 (1998): 73-100.
Reads LGW as a work about "voluntarist" hermeneutics, reflected in Cupid's "cupidinous," tyrannical understanding of TC and in the narrator's telling of the legends as a "testamentary document of a dying author."
Simpson, James.
Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 29: 325-55, 1999.
Literary and historical periodization conventionally depends on viewing the lyrics of Wyatt and Surrey (for example) as distinctive and innovative, expressing a characteristically "Renaissance" divided self that is isolated from political and social…
Simpson, James.
New Medieval Literatures 4: 213-42, 2001.
Surveys the reception of Lydgate, especially his "Dance Machabré", and argues that the poet has been victimized by "'ageist' conceptions of cultural change" that seek to reify "the medieval." Lydgate's stature as the most public of English poets…
Simpson, James.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
The volume surveys the literature of late medieval and early modern English writers in relation to political institutions contemporary with the literature, tracing an arc of "diminishing liberties." Simpson characterizes the shift in literature from…
Simpson, James.
Seth Lerer, ed. The Yale Companion to Chaucer (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006), pp. 55-86.
Simpson explores Chaucer's absorption of and reactions to Continental influences (Latin, French, and Italian), emphasizing the recurrent influence of Ovid as a source and a model. BD is a poem of deference to Gaunt and to French tradition; HF and PF…
Simpson, James.
Gordon McMullan and David Matthews, eds. Reading the Medieval in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 17-30.
Whereas fifteenth-century writers such as Hoccleve, Lydgate, and Skelton wrote texts that engaged in "a kind of conversation" with Chaucer, sixteenth-century writers treated Chaucer as a distant topic of philological study. Simpson argues that this…
Simpson, James.
Brian Cummings and James Simpson, eds. Cultural Reformations: Medieval and Renaissance in Literary History (New York: Oxford University Press), pp. 95-112.
Compares what PardT and Erasmus's "Pilgrimage of Pure Devotion" reveal about the "locatability" and placelessness of the Church, exclusion from Church locations, and disgust associated with such exclusion.
Simpson, James.
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 37 (2015): 31-54.
Explores aspects of anagogical reading practices and their relations with social prediction and prophecy. Reformation readers perceived predestinarian and prophetic themes in spurious Chaucerian texts, although Chaucer himself seems to distrust…
Simpson, James.
Andrew James Johnston, Russell West-Pavlov, and Elisabeth Kempf, eds. Love, History and Emotion in Chaucer and Shakespeare: "Troilus and Criseyde" and "Troilus and Cressida" (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), pp. 189-206.
Treats the literary tradition of Troy as a war in which different versions of the story struggle to claim validity. Focuses on how Shakespeare seeks to "deface and disable the entire tradition," rendering it "unfit for any but the lowest human…
Simpson, James.
Helen M. Hickey, Anne McKendry, and Melissa Raine, eds. Contemporary Chaucer across the Centuries (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018), pp. 218-33.
Proposes as an epistemological and hermeneutical concept that "literary cognition is fundamentally a matter of re-cognition," exploring recognition as cognition in literary texts and in the apprehension of literary texts. Examines Virgil's "Aeneid"…
