Browse Items (16472 total)

Focuses on Chaucer's rhetoric and presents a chapter targeted at students, with an "aim to persuade the student of the richness and literary fertility of Chaucer's rhetorical culture." Offers background of contemporary scholarship on Chaucer and…

Traces elegiac, tragic, and pseudo-historical traditions in late medieval English narratives of Troy, arguing that they are all "anti-Virgilian, and therefore anti-imperialist" and "also somber, monitory, skeptical and intimately sensitive to the…

Examines the manuscript portrait of Chaucer in the Ellesmere manuscript (El) and its scribal rubrics as they reflect the poet's status in his own age. Reviews historical study of the manuscript, its provenance, tale order, and text, accepting Chaucer…

Assesses how Chaucer's references to Alain de Lille's works in HF, 985–89 and PF, 315–18 distinguish his own poetic project from the Neoplatonic ideals that Alain represents, preferring worldly tidings to the spiritual wisdom of the empyrean, and…

Assesses the syntax and rhetorical/literary functions of the "open-ended list that forms part of a sentence," focusing on those composed during the "cultural revolution" at the beginning of the Reformation in sixteenth-century England, but framed by…

Discloses the implications--some "shocking"--of recognizing Statius's "Thebaid" as the source of Criseyde's imagining of "radical atheism" in TC, IV.1408-11. Explicates resonances of Thebes/Trojan parallels evident elsewhere in the poem and in…

Considers WBPT as a "not yet" text, i.e., one that "points to a future resolution" without providing it. Rich in "represented reception" on the pilgrimage and in "contested reception" in manuscript glossing, critical response, and adaptation, the…

Pandarus exhibits absolute loyalty to his lord--one of the values of Indo-European heroic philosophy--while at the same time betraying his own sister.

Textbook introduction to appreciating and analyzing poetry, with a chronological anthology of English and American verse which includes excerpts from GP: 1.1-34 (opening), 79-100 (Squire), 165-207 (Monk), and 445-76, (Wife of Bath). Expanded versions…

Uses TC to show why Boethius "so compelled Chaucer's imagination" and demonstrates that the outcome of Chaucer's plot is "fitting" to the characters as established earlier in the poem. Focuses on Troilus's Boethian soliloquy and on Criseyde's…

Attributes the need to use translations of Chaucer's works in college classrooms to students' lack of "linguistic awareness," and assesses the relative virtues of eight translations or modernizations of NPT, commenting on fidelity to meaning,…

Explores the "[p]ossible influence" of ShT "on the Don Juan theme" in England and in Spain, observing that the former "is likely enough but difficult to prove," while the latter is "very unlikely and virtually unprovable."

Assesses the attitudes toward love and internality reflected in various accounts of the Dido and Aeneas story: Virgil's "Aeneid," Ovid's "Heroides," the "Roman d'Enéas," Chaucer's LGW, and Marlowe's "Dido Queen of Carthage." Chaucer derives his…

FranT is comedic in structure from first to last since all the events are equally lucky for all the characters by the end of the tale. Noble gestures are made, even by the magician,but neither harm nor disadvantage results for any of those who make…

Tries to reconcile the change from the naturalism of the "Prologue" to the abstract quality of the tale. Gives an extended definition of "gentilesse."

Item not seen; listed in MLA International Bibliography.

Claims that William Dunbar's debt to Chaucer (WBPT) in his "Tua Meriit Wemen and the Wedo, "although "important and considerable, is often exaggerated beyond helpfulness." The poem owes a great deal to earlier alliterative poetry, in particular…

Focuses on three letters that preface Thomas Speght's Chaucer editions, which "conceive, invite, and attempt to influence their audiences." Argues that these letters reveal that the intended audience included both the established audience for Chaucer…

Analyzes the "marginalia, damages, repairs, signatures, and bindings" of the copy of William Caxton's second edition of CT (Foundation Martin Bodmer, Cologny, Switzerland, Inc, B. 70) as signs of the ways it has been used and regarded historically,…

Explains the important place in the tradition of Chaucer portraiture of John Speed's engraving made for Thomas Speght's 1598 edition of Chaucer's "Workes". Comments on relations with the manuscript portrait of Chaucer that accompanies Thomas…

Inscribed in Durham Palace Green Library, Bamburgh Select. 8, a copy of the "c. 1550 Thynne edition of Chaucer's Workes," this epitaph stands apart from the three Latin texts heretofore known. One of its signatories may be identified as the "Edmund…

Focuses "on fifteenth-century manuscripts of Chaucer, and . . . how these volumes were read, used, valued, and transformed" in the early modern period, reflecting "conventions which circulated in print and . . . convey prevailing preoccupations about…

Includes a summary of Pound's appreciative criticism of Chaucer's poetry and the possible impact the assessment had on T. S. Eliot's views.

The "viritoot" of MilT 3870 is probably a top used in a game. The word caused Chaucer's scribes considerable difficulty and might be a nonce-word. The image conveys Absolon's mental and physical energy.

Presents the social history of late-fourteenth-century England so readers may duplicate medieval food, clothing, entertainment, etc.