Browse Items (16364 total)

Explores Chaucer's uses of narrative terms, such as "storie," "tale," "fable," "tretys," "tragedye," "legend," etc.," focusing on their relative degrees of exposition, fictionality, and historicity and the faithfulness of the narratives to source…

Identifies the ways in which various genre terms are used in Middle English narratives about Troy, including TC where "tragedie" is consistently applied to the narrative. Comments on Latin and French usage and on terms applied to Chaucer's other…

Gauges Chaucer's attitude toward "reason and revelation," and argues that "one of the structural principles" of CT is the "pursuit of moral wisdom," particularly in movement from KnT to ParsT and in the image of pilgrimage.

Traces the imagery and diction of hunting, snaring, imprisoning, and entrapment in TC and KnT, showing how it informs the concern with destiny, freedom, and interpersonal manipulation in the poems.

Shows that Chaucer's description of the garden in PF 204-10, part of the tradition of "locus amoenus," also "engages the conventional elements and rhetorical style of medieval pictures of heaven or paradise." Such adjustments to Boccaccio's…

Demonstrates that Chaucer's source for the remedial virtues offered as antidotes to the vices in ParsT is a Latin treatise here titled "Postquam" that often appears with material from Peraldus's "Summa de Vitiis," the major source of the Tale.…

Characterizes the Monk as the "satiric consummation of all possible monastic faults," analyzing him in light of the "seven points of disciple" of the Rule of St. Benedict (obedience, poverty, celibacy, propertylessness, labor, claustration, and…

Summarizes the plot of French fabliau "Bérenger au long cul" and suggests that it helps to "explain the background upon which Chaucer was drawing when he decided to make January a knight of Lombardy" in MerT.

Explicates details and images of the Cook in ManP to argue for a "three-fold elaboration": the besotted Cook is a "victim of obsession with drink" who exhibits the pallor of the love-lorn knight which is also the paleness of the alchemical…

Includes three essays that pertain to Chaucer, one previously printed. For the two new essays, search for Studies in Medieval Renaissance American Literature under Alternative Title.

Describes and analyzes the versification of "The Tale of Gamelyn," arguing that its "prosodic system . . . falls somewhere between" those of Chaucer and of "Piers Plowman."

Proposes a "taxonomy" of medieval romance, which is epitomized by "chivalric romance," but ranges widely in mode, tone, and motif from "proto-romance" to "counter-romance." Characterizes various forms and sub-forms and includes tabular anatomies of…

Suggests that T. S. Eliot's "The Wasteland" echoes RvT 1.3889-3898, where Chaucer "personifies Death as a bartender."

Interprets details of physiognomy in the characterizations of Alison and Absolon in MilT; hers indicate her "availability"; his, his timidity and foppishness.

Finds three kinds of character doubling in TC: Hector is an "echoic or reflective doubling" of Troilus, Pandarus and Troilus double as complementary portions of one lover, and Diomedes is Troilus's "dramatically opposing" double.

Introduces Chaucer's life and works to the modern reader, summarizing the plots of individual works and explaining medieval practices and details that underlie them, and attending to their relative chronology, sources, innovations, genres, and…

Reports 125 items.

Records the generally positive view of Chaucer as a "compilator" of CT found in Bibliothèque Nationale Paris MS, fonds anglais 39, once owned by John of Angoulême. The rubrics of the manuscript, executed by the scribe Duxworth, record particular…

Investigates what makes TC "so alive for us today," assessing the poem's psychologically rich depictions of the characters' (including the narrator's) engagements with their own experiences and their detachments from them. Tinged with…

Shows that the characterization of Calchas in TC influenced the fifteenth-century "Sege of Troy."

Cites TC 2.752 as the source of Sir Thomas Wyatt's use of "lusty leese" in "Myne owne John Poyntz," line 83.

Critiques editorial decisions in punctuating and glossing TC 3.1751-57, comparing the passage with its original in Boethius's "Consolation of Philosophy."

Proposes that Cicero's "De Inventione" is the source of TC 4.407-13; the subsequent reference (4.414-15) to "Zanzis" is Chaucer's corruption of "Zeuxis."

Reconsiders relations among ShT, Sercambi's "Novelle" no. 31, and Boccaccio's "Decameron" nos. 8.1 and 8.2, suggesting that it is "not unreasonable" to think that Chaucer "might have known all three of the analogues."

Comments on Chaucer's interest in the physiognomic implications of Criseyde's joined eyebrows in relation to his sources.