Browse Items (16538 total)

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…

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…

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…

Argues that Chaucer "cancelled" NPE "because his conception of the Nun's Priest's character changed, and that he gave the Priest's first character to the Monk." The cancelation dissolves the "potentially disgusting identification of Chauntecleer and…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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.

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 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…

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…

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…

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,…

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…

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…

Chaucer's religious tales (Mel, ParsT, ClT, MLT, PrT, SNT, PhyT, MkT) are "predicated upon the assumption that the significance of human life is the transcending of its secular limitation through Christian faith." The only tales in CT not written in…

Although it is common to separate the religious message of ClT from the tale's portrayal of women and marriage, the two are "linked," with the juxtaposition of Griselda and Alison of Bath representing "opposite solutions to the problem of women's…

Examining both ecclesiastical and societal patriarchies, SNT addresses medieval concepts of power, authority, and autonomy. It places Cecilia's spiritual vision in the context of a broader secular and sacred order.

Through pathos, Chaucer evokes the audience's sympathy, thus transforming PrT, MLT, and ClT from mere tales of wonder or religious abstraction into convincing, dramatic treatments of the virtues they celebrate.

Unpacks allegorical aspects of "domus" (household, community, regulation, tradition, order) and "lingua" (speech, noise, murmuring, poetry, vernacularity) in Gower's "Vox clamantis" and in HF, using Fredric Jameson's notion of "national allegory" to…

Huxtable surveys medieval philosophical and religious understanding of sight and color as background to commentary on social concerns with color in sumptuary habits and heraldry. In ParsT 10.424-27, colorful clothing indicates a sinful nature.