Steel, Karl.
How Not to Make a Human: Pets, Feral Children, Worms, Sky Burial, Oysters (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019), pp. 17-40.
Reviews medieval disapproval of pet-keeping among religious personnel as evidence that companionship with animals has a long history and that medieval "pet-love" can "help us to unthink the human." Comments on pet-slayings in versions of the…
Steele, Elizabeth.
Henry James Review 13 (1992): 126-42.
Tallies parallels between James's "The American" and Chaucer's TC, including aspects of characterization (James "splits" Chaucer's major characters), plot, and diction.
Steenbrugge, Charlotte.
Clíodhna Carney and Frances McCormack, eds. Chaucer's Poetry: Words, Authority and Ethics (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2013), pp. 121-33..
Enters the discussion about apparent temporal discrepancies in PF and reframes it with a reminder that the poem occurs in a dream vision, and need not correspond literally to English weather and bird behavior. Embraces contradictory references to…
Steimatsky, Noa.
Hebrew Unviersity Studies in Literature and the Arts 15 (1987): 36-43.
PardT contains a series of mirror paradoxes: the rioters' quest to slay Death becomes Death's quest to slay them; the Old Man claims he cannot find Death but directs the rioters to it; and the rioters' success in their quest proves to be their…
Stein, Gabriele.
Braj B. Kachru and Henry Kahane, eds. Cultures, Ideologies, and the Dictionary: Studies in Honor of Ladislav Zgusta (Tubingen: Niemeyer, 1995), pp. 127-39.
Examines citations of Chaucer and Lydgate in John Palsgrave's "Lesclarcissement de la langue francoyse" (1530) as indications of the dictionary-maker's efforts to record "special language use," i.e., dialectical use and varying registers.
Stein, Robert M.
James J. Paxson and Cynthia A. Gravlee, eds. Desiring Discourse: The Literature of Love, Ovid Through Chaucer (Selinsgrove, Penn.: Susquehanna University Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1998), pp. 188-205.
As the Miller refuses to allow easy closure to KnT, so the Tale's opening is rooted in the uneasy conquest of Femenye. Throughout the Tale, patterns that suggest resolution fail to reach their hoped-for conclusion, indicating the ongoing nature of…
Stein, Robert M., ed.
Notre Dame, Ind. : University of Notre Dame Press, 2005.
Twenty essays by various authors and a bibliography of Hanning's publications. The essays are divided into three sections: history and romance, Chaucer's works, and Italian contexts. For nine essays that pertain to Chaucer, search for Reading…
Steinberg, Aaron.
College English 26.3 (1964): 187-91.
Compares the knight's decision in the marriage bed of WBT to that of the analogous one in the more mythic "Marriage of Sir Gawain," arguing that in the context of Chaucer's relatively realistic Tale, the decision to return the choice to the loathly…
The two distinct "social spaces" within the poem--the city of Troy and the Greek camp--represent the varying attitudes of the characters inhabiting them, particularly their attitudes concerning women. When Criseyde is given over to Diomede, however,…
Steinberg, Glenn A.
English Literary Renaissance 35.1 (2005): 331ı51
Spenser's adoption of Chaucerian humility should be understood in light of Elizabethan debates about Chaucer. Although Chaucer is universally listed as preeminent among English poets, his detractors find him lacking in moral or stylistic weight,…
Steinberg, Glenn A.
Dissertation Abstracts International 55.08 (1995): 2383A.
Post-structuralist analysis of Chaucer's use of Dante as a source in HF and TC, and Spenser's use of Chaucer's BD in his "Daphnaida" and HF in his Mutabilitie Cantos.
Explores "the socioeconomic significance of the ugly, monstrous figures in the Gawain romances" and in WBT, arguing that Chaucer "bifurcates" the "ugly antagonist" of the romances into the "crude, social-climbing Wife . . . and the loathly lady of…
Steinberg, Glenn.
Theresa M. Krier, ed. Refiguring Chaucer in the Renaissance (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998), pp. 91-109.
Reads Spenser's "Daphnaida" as a "refiguration and response" to BD, modified by Spenser's Protestant outlook. Compares and contrasts the two poems, considering tone, idiom, and faith in the ability of art to console.
Assesses Chaucer's sense of poetic tradition in HF, arguing that while following Dante's use of the vernacular, Chaucer eschewed Italian emulation of classical models because he distrusted "classical pretensions to artistic or moral superiority."
Steinberg examines differences between depictions of Nature in Spenser's Mutabilitie Cantos and in Chaucer's PF. For Spenser, disorder inheres in nature, while in Chaucer it results from human "pettiness and passion." Such differences remind us of…
Makes the case that Boccaccio responds in the many trial scenes of the "Decameron" to contemporary concerns about verisimilitude in judicial proceedings. Claims that Boccaccio shifts in the role of judicial figures from mediators to determiners of…
Steinberg, Theodore L.
Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2003.
An introduction to the study of medieval literature, with chapters on "Beowulf," "Chrétien de Troyes, the "Lais" of Marie de France, "The Romance of the Rose," "The Tale of Genji," Jewish literature, sagas, Dante, "Pearl," "Sir Gawain and the Green…
Steiner, Emily, and Candace Barrington, eds.
Ithaca, N.Y., and Londons : Cornell University Press, 2002.
Nine New Historicist essays by various authors, assessing the intersections of legal history and literature and addressing Robin Hood, the N-Town Trial play, The Owl and the Nightingale, alliterative poetry, Lollard preaching, and works by Chaucer,…
Steiner, Emily, and Lynn Ransom, eds.
Philadelphia: The Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies, University of Pennsylvania Libraries, 2015.
Presents essays that explore ways that manuscript evidence is used to understand "literary, geographic, scientific, devotional, and hagiographical knowledge" in the later Middle Ages. For an essay that pertains to Chaucer, search for Taxonomies of…
Steiner, Emily.
New Medieval Literatures 6 (2003): 199-22.
Steiner assesses political "clamor," "appeal," and "voice," using them to discuss the Prologue to "Piers Plowman" as a work in which "commonality" is "the poem's ideological subject and poetic process." Suggests briefly that the same is true of PF.
Assesses the political character of late medieval English poetry, arguing that it extends the political thinking found in contemporary legal writing. Focuses on the notion of "diversity" in "Piers Plowman" and other alliterative verse as an extension…
Steiner, Emily.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
Discusses the literary and historical contexts of Langland's poetics, and argues that the poem's "multilingualism makes it an exemplary English poem." Chapter 2, "Learning (B.8-12)," refers to WBT, MilT, and ClT.
Steiner, Emily.
In The Open Access Companion to the Canterbury Tales. https://opencanterburytales.dsl.lsu.edu, 2017. Relocated 2025 at https://opencanterburytales.lsusites.org/
Explores the relations between emotion and identity in PrPT, observing that the presence of Jews "amps up its emotional charge," particularly how it "provokes--and coopts--a huge range of emotions in the service of Christian piety." Considers the…
Steiner, Emily.
Mary C. Flannery and Katie C. Walter, eds. The Culture of Inquisition in Medieval England (Cambridge: Brewer, 2013), pp. 164-72.
Responds to the nine essays in this volume, exploring relations among inquisition, innovation, creativity, and imagination. Discusses LGWP as a poem that "seeks its inventiveness in law at the same time that it invites its readers to enjoy the…
