Browse Items (16470 total)

With the inevitable variations produced by different scribes, CT has been edited by copyists who interpret the work variously (e.g., as ordered or unordered). A critical edition of the spurious links is here presented.

Examines Chaucer's uses of the "reverdie" of spring and allusions to the season especially in GP and elsewhere in CT.

Comprised of two related essays. The first, by Woo, assesses the pilgrimage frame of CT, its ecclesiastical pilgrims, ParsPT, and Ret, emphasizing the contrasts between the Pardoner and the Parson as religious figures. The second, by Matthews,…

Studies commentaries on the biblical Song of Songs written before the sixteenth century, and explores the motif of spiritual marriage in various literary works, including works by Chaucer.

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.

Interprets Troilus's failure to take action to keep Criseyde in Troy as a lack of "mesure," a courtly quality praised by troubadour poets. His lack, however, evinces the depth of his love and he, at times, "takes on the role a troubadour" by seeking…

Shows that in his "Cambus Khan" Leigh Hunt is indebted to Edmund Spenser (and others who followed him) in modernizing Part I of SqT "almost as much as he is to Chaucer."

Includes discussion of how Chaucer's influence on Spenser's works inflects the Virgilian "epic paradigm" of the Renaissance poet, observing how in his treatments of Dido in HF and LGW Chaucer "figures his poetic identity . . . in terms of…

Gauges the "literary probability" that the Envoy to ClT (and the preceding stanza), 4.1170-1212, was intended by Chaucer to be voiced by the Clerk, suggesting that either the Host or the Wife of Bath may be considered the speaker, adducing manuscript…

Identifies parallel concerns with privacy and erotic tension in TC and Shakespeare's "Troilus and Cressida," both of which pose the closed space of the bedchamber against the pressures of crowdedness in Troy/London, gossip, and public observation.…

The literature of courtly love does not accurately reflect medieval behavior in matters of love and sexual relations. Criseyde's "Who yaf me drinke?" (TC 2.651) derives from the motif of the love potion, which symbolizes "the overwhelming, obsessive…

Argues that BD draws on Welsh mythology for a number of its details including the king named Octavian, the hunt motif, and the "white castle on a rich hill." King Octavian is a "composite figure" with several onomastic resonances.

Investigates the logic of "sovereignty" in PhyT, and how sovereignty is transferred from God, to nature, then to Virginia, and back to the people who "subvert the
entire political order" toward the end of the tale. Sovereignty is directly associated…

An edition of the ministry and Passion section of the southern version of the "Cursor Mundi," with introduction, notes, and textual apparatus.

Argues that de Worde's text of MkT results from collation of Caxton's second edition with a manuscript probably of the Hengwrt group. There is no sign of editing beyond the evident desire to produce a complete text of MkT.

In this "first printed work of English vernacular literary criticism" (dated 1575), Gascoigne refers to ParsT (10.43) in arguing "For it is not inough to roll in pleasant woordes, nor yet to thunder in Rym, Ram, Ruff, by letter (quoth my master…

Five patristic quotations in ParsT have not been noted: one originates in Pseudo-Augustine, a second in Isidore of Seville, another in St. Jerome, and two others can be traced to St. Gregory.

Identifies Numbers 11.5 as the primary source of the Summoner's "dietary preferences" for garlic, onions, and leeks in GP 1.624.

Explores relations among the section on the vices in ParsT and its sources and/or analogues in Peraldus's "Summa de Vitiis" and two derivative treatises, here referred to by their initial words, "Quoniam" and "Primo" respectively. The latter…

Studies Chaucer's stylistic techniques, comparing several texts (KnT, MLT, PhyT, MkT, ManT, and LGW) with sources to show that Chaucer employed a style that was remarkably consistent across genres, rather than appropriating the styles of source…

Focusing on the exemplum of Ceyx and Alcyone in BD, illustrates Chaucer's "early use of multiple sources in close alternating sequence," discussing source relations with Machaut, Froissart, Virgil, Ovid, Statius, the "Ovide Moralise," and the "Roman…

Combining Bosio's edition of the "Passio S. Caeciliae" and the "Legenda Aurea" accounts for all but eight discountable details of SNT and,independently, for the English analogues. Chaucer adapts rather than translates.

Locates in Old French love poems sources for various aspects of BD, citing previously unnoticed parallels with passages from Guillaume de Machaut and Jean Froissart, and arguing that similar parallels and the "general situation and conduct" of…

The Parson's quotation from St. John Chrysostom (10.109-10) is translated from St. Raymund of Pennaforte's "Summa Casuum Poenitentiae." Its ultimate source, however, is a Latin homily (not in the modern editions of the fathers), the "Sermo de…

Investigates resonances between the garden settings in FranT and in the June eclogue of Spenser's "Shepheardes Calender," exploring the "spatialised poetics" of Dorigen's and Colin's shared inability to enjoy the pleasures of a classical/Christian…