Blandeau, Agnès.
Bulletin des Anglicistes Médiévistes 74 (2008): 71-90.
Comparing Chaucer's and that of Peter Ackroyd in "The Clerkenwell Tales," Blandeau shows Ackroyd's indebtedness to Chaucer's use of images and sense of detail.
Blandeau, Agnès.
Colette Stévanovitch, Elise Louviot, Philippe Mahoux-Pauzin, and Dominique Hascoët, eds. La Formule dans la Littérature et la Civilisation de l'Angleterre Médiévale (Nancy: Presses Universitaires de Nancy, Regards Croisés sur le Monde Anglophone, 2011), pp. 273-99.
Focuses on Ackroyd's use of Chaucer's "formulism" (Zumthor) and reflects on how successful the accumulation of medieval formulas and sayings really is.
Blandeau, Agnés.
Claire Vial, ed. 'Gode is the lay, swete is the note': Résonances dans les lais bretons moyen-anglais / Echoes in the Middle English Breton Lays (2014): n.p. (web publication).
Assesses the theme of keeping one's word in Breton lays, including FranT, focusing on the theme's Middle Ages: pledging and keeping one's word, and its opposite, breaking one's promise or betraying one's pledge.
Blandeau, Agnès.
Karine Martin-Cardini and Jocelyne Aubé-Bourligueux, eds. Le Néo: sources, héritages et réécritures dans les cultures européennes (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2016), pp. 169-80.
Examines echoes, resemblances, and differences between the evocations of Lucretia in LGW, BD, and CT, and German painter Lucas Cranach's portrait (1513) of the Roman paragon of wifely virtue. References to Chaucer's poems, its ancient sources, and…
Blandeau, Agnès.
Isabelle Fernandes, ed. Martyr et martyre: Dans la Chrétienté de l'Europe occidentale, du Moyen Age jusqu'au début du XVIIe siècle (Clermont-Ferrand: Presses Universitaires Blaise Pascal, 2020), pp. 85-04.
Includes references to GP, MLT, SNT, ClP, PrT, and FrT.
Blank, Claudia, and others, eds.
Frankfurt-on-Main, Bern, New York, and Paris: Peter Lang, 1992
A collection of 100 essays on linguistic topics categorized as diachronic linguistics, linguistics and cultural studies, computer linguistics, varieties of English, and synchronic linguistics. For individual essays that pertain to Chaucer, search for…
Blatt, Heather.
Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018.
Draws on modern media studies to clarify practices of "participatory reading" in late medieval England, exploring how vernacular authors, texts, and manuscripts elicit and/or limit the agency of their readers who engage with texts in making meaning,…
Apocryphal traditions surrounding the Annunciation and Joseph's doubts impart complex depths to the scene in the pear tree and its aftermath, including Joseph's (January's) weak sight and his comforting of Mary (the womb patting).
Bleeth, Kenneth (A.)
Kathryn Lynch, ed. Chaucer's Cultural Geography (New York and London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 21-31.
Bleeth surveys critical responses to SqT for the ways they reflect assumptions about and attitudes toward the East as a cultural Other. Considers criticism from Thomas Warton (1778) through recent efforts to come to terms with and go beyond Edward…
Bleeth, Kenneth A.
American Notes and Queries 20 (1982): 130-31.
In adapting the fourth "question d'amore" of the "Filocolo" into the story of FranT, Chaucer changed the task from a flowering garden in January to "remoeve alle the rokkes" from the Brittany coast. Chaucer may have derived this idea from Ovid's…
Bleeth, Kenneth A.
English Studies 74 (1993): 113-23.
The fantasies of the rocks and the garden, initially denoting personal obsession, lose their ominous character when Dorigen and Aurelius enter into dialogue, a discourse grounded in mutual understanding. Unlike the dangerous rocks, threats to our…
Bleeth, Kenneth A.
Larry D. Benson, ed. The Learned and the Lewed: Studies in Chaucer and Medieval Literature. Harvard English Studies, no. 5 (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974), pp. 45-60.
Examines various evocations of paradise as a garden in MerT as parodic inversions of Christian understanding of the scene of the Fall.
Bleeth, Kenneth.
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 28 (2006): 221-24.
Argues that written texts are not the only valid sources of PhyT and acknowledges the need to consider "remembered texts, semantic fields, and pictorial images" - "intertexts" theorized by Michael Riffaterre.
Bleeth, Kenneth.
Laura L. Howes, ed. Place, Space, and Landscape in Medieval Narrative (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2007), pp.107-17.
Bleeth examines the ways that gardens in TC, KnT, MerT, and FranT reveal Chaucer's discomfort with the aristocratic fantasy of "pure play," idealized in the Roman de la Rose and separated from the world.
Bleeth, Kenneth.
Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017.
A complete annotated bibliography of scholarly and critical treatments of SqT, FranT, and PhyT from 1900 through 2005, subdivided into the following categories: editions and modernizations of each tale; sources, analogues, and later influence of each…
Bleier, Roman, Brian Coleman, and Clare Fletcher, eds.
New York: Peter Lang, 2022.
Collects twelve essays from the 2016 conference on memory and identity, with a preface and a cumulative index. For four essays that pertain to Chaucer, search for Memory and Identity in the Medieval and Early Modern World under Alternative Title.
Blenner-Hassett, Roland
Anglia: Zeitschrift für Englische Philologie 72 (1954): 455-62.
Suggests that Chaucer's astrological references in FranT and PF, particularly the deterministic "phases of the moon, " the Great Year, and the depiction of Scipio, are likely to have influenced W. B. Yeats' prose treatise, "A Vision" (1925; rev.…
Bliss, Jane.
Rochester, N.Y.; and Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2008.
Bliss surveys the variety of ways that names, naming, and namelessness in romance "contribute to our understanding" of the genre, focusing on Middle English narratives but also discussing French and Anglo-Norman analogues. She identifies a number…
Focuses on Elizabethan versions of the Griselda story but includes discussion of how the context of CT dislocates both allegorical and literal readings of ClT. Efforts to resolve this dislocation prompt Elizabethan and later versions.
Bloch, R. Howard.
Qui Parle 2 (1988): 22-45; Representations 28 (1989): 113-34.
Explicates Virginia's death by reference to patristic definitions of virginity as the desired ideal veiled in substance, a state inevitably transgressed by the gaze. By extension, the ideal that virginity implies is destroyed by its articulation. …
Ferster's and Fradenburg's essays problematize the critical act of reading medieval texts: Ferster's examination of "who speaks" in PrT extends to the critic's own voice; Fradenburg's articulation of medievalists' anxieties concerning the status of…
Bloch, R. Howard.
Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1991.
Explores the scriptural roots of medieval attitudes toward women, focusing on how various kinds of abstraction and aestheticizing led to fundamentally misogynistic contradictions. Examines French romances, lays, and lyrics for the ways they elevate…
Argues that the Host's mention of "half-wey pryme" in RvP 1.3906 refers to the canonical hour of prime rather than "modern clock time" and means 6:30 am, rather than 7:30 as it is often explained. Compares other chronological references in CT…