Browse Items (16479 total)

Explores the "political erotics" of LGWP, especially the G version, assessing how Cupid's treatment of the narrator and Alceste's intercession reflect political conditions, concepts of tyranny, and notions of loyalty and fidelity.

The "Amazonian" associations - legendary and figurative - of the women in LGW and KnT align the two narratives and suggest that the passive or intercessory roles of royal women in Chaucer's society entailed the "absent presence" of threat to that…

TC includes references to animals through frequent analogy and extended imagery, but these are often generically inappropriate. Dreams about animals are largely unexplored. Comparison of Troilus to the horse Bayard not only emphasizes the hero's…

In SqT Chaucer practices a form of anthropomorphism that acknowledges its representational limits. The relationship of Canacee and the falcon shows "a commonality among living creatures" and offers a model of female friendship. Canacee nurses the…

In some modern views, and in John of Trevisa's "On the Properties of Things," animals have feelings and communicate. Similarly, CT and PF demonstrate "the value and pleasure of minds speaking to other minds," whether human or avian. Late medieval…

Classical and medieval antifeminist texts disparagingly compare women and animals. In WBP, Alisoun "redeploys animal similes" to claim the privileges of animal-like status because she is naturally crafty and sly, impatient, and cannot be held…

Animals figure prominently in BD but are more than mere symbols. Ceyx's dead body is also an "unnatural animal." The birds, horse, whelp, and hart invite, but also resist, interpretation. The juxtaposition of death and animalistic vitality evokes…

Although anthropocentric, BD emphasizes the similarity of animals and humans under the law of "kynde." They share an "embodied state and an ethical system as a result of their shared creation." The hart, object of the hunt, parallels the Black…

In KnT, warriors are compared to animals, a seemingly desirable condition that would allow warriors to "discharge at will their power and violence." However, several references to shackled, confined, or endangered animals create a contrast between…

Form Age shares thematic elements with Alexander legends, including vegetarianism and prohibitions against agriculture. In these poems humans live as, and eat as, animals do, a contrast to the mastery described in Genesis. The life described in these…

NPT demonstrates the danger of reading "for a single abstract moral" by means of its emphasis on Chauntecleer's humanlike qualities. Among his most human attributes are experiencing and expounding a dream. If "men" refers to both humans and chickens,…

Explores anthropomorphism and the "connaturality" of human and nonhuman animals in PF and Lydgate's "Debate of the Horse, Goose, and Sheep," noting the comments of medieval and modern philosophers on the traditional animal-human binary. Lydgate's…

Compares the birds of PF to birds in medieval scientific texts, in sources or analogues (especially Alan de Lille's "De planctu Naturae"), and in the observable environment. Chaucer fills PF with birds known in England, classifying them by diet but…

Argues that the cuckoo-merlin dialogue in PF deconstructs the traditional human-animal binary by presenting a "fleeting realization of anthropomorphism gone awry." The cuckoo's "brood parasitism . . . resolves itself into a mode of communal profit"…

Describes the specific appearance of vellum, the types of quills used in creating a medieval manuscript, and animal-inflicted damage to manuscripts by mice, bugs, etc. Intersperses discussion of NPT with regard to Chauntecleer's appearance and…

The Pardoner is compared to a hare, goat, and horse, and PardT refers to smaller animals usually considered vermin. The three gluttonous rioters are appropriately called shrews, and the poison used to kill them is ostensibly bought for rats and a…

Although some falconers were female, the activity of training (often female) falcons is highly gendered. The necessity of the falcon to be tamed is paralleled in the need for Emelye in KnT to submit to heterosexual marriage, and for Canacee in SqT to…

Themes of "trouthe" and "gentillesse," as well as the threat of suicide, in the SqT falcon episode (5.409-631) anticipate major themes of FranT. Because SqT is prior in the narrative sequence, the human language of FranT parodies avian language…

Spanish version of Arboleda Guirao's essay "Chaucer's 'Wife of Bath's Prologue' in 'The Canterbury Tales.' The Wife's Personality, Language and Life: Revisiting Feminism," published in 2011.

Compares conceptual metaphors in MilT and in its Croatian translation by Luko Paljetak (1986) in order to determine which metaphors are "conventional in both languages and cultures." In Croatian, with an English abstract.

Copeland describes the difficulties and potential for confusion in imprecise library cataloging of digital versions of books, focusing on differences between particular works and books and assessing as one example the 1998 Octavo CD-Rom version of…

Williams considers adaptation of the Consolatio for courtly audiences in a number of works, including HF, WBT, and the "oft overlooked Boethian poems" Form Age, For, Truth, Sted, and Gent. These overlooked poems were particularly popular in…

Surveys the "brilliantly imaginative, formally experimental, and socially self-aware" poetry of early sixteenth-century English, with emphasis on its transitions from Chaucerian tradition and to Shakespearean tradition, the importance of Ovidian…

Questions how well Thomas Hoccleve's translation of Christine de Pizan's "Epistre au dieu d'amours" captures the "wit of the original," arguing that the translation was influenced by LGW and by other Chaucerian works and suggesting that Christine's…

Examines the "defense-of-women" section near the end of Hoccleve's "Regiment" (lines 5090-194) as a meditation on literary influence and the need for the poet to comment on political issues. The defense alludes to the Wife of Bath and to…