Boyd, Beverly, ed.
Lawrence, Ks.: Allen Press, 1978.
Edits Caxton's earliest Chaucer publications, except for the first printing of CT, including PF (aka "The Temple of Brass"), Henry Scogan's "Treatise" that includes Chaucer's Gent, the lyric "Wyth empty honde" that Chaucer alludes to in WBP (3.415)…
Boyd, Beverly.
Florilegium 10 (1991, for 1988): 99-105.
Chaucer is more attentive to the noises produced by people and their actions than to those of natural phenomena. He often suggests noises rather than describing them directly. His noisiest passages involve tournaments, chases, and music.
In this study of Princeton MS 100.1, Boyd posits that the b-text, admittedly faulty, represents the parchment core of MS Helmingham, itself an effort to save CT through cutting and summarizing the text. Its errors might also lie in the fact that…
Boyd, Beverly.
Florilegium 9 (1990, for 1987): 147-54.
Almost all Chaucer's poetry specifically addressed to Mary includes translation, adaptation, or quotations from disparate sources brought together via "collage" technique. This layered effect has precedent in church liturgy and macaronic lyric.
Boyd, Beverly.
Fifteenth-Century Studies, 1. Ed. Guy R. Mermier & Edelgard E. DuBruck. (Kalamazoo: Medieval Inst., Western Michigan University): pp. 15-21.
The influence of Italian poets on Chaucer is but one of many illustrations that the Italian Renaissance had reached fourteenth-century England. But a prevailing conservatism prevented the Renaissance from flourishing in fourteenth- and…
Chaucer's frequent references to nagging wives and henpecked husbands have less to do with his personal views than with his awareness of audience; women as well as men could share the misogynistic joke because in Pauline theory the shrew was "some…
Boyd, Beverly.
Res Publica Litterarum: Studies in the Classical Tradition 17 (1994): 147-52.
Considers Emelye's prayer in KnT in light of both Boccaccio's "Teseida" and the fertility symbolism in Chaucer's tale, concluding that the prayer should be understood in terms of Diana's various mythological powers, while the answer should be…
Boyd, Beverly.
Anne Clark Bartlett, Thomas H. Bestul, Janet Goebel, and William F. Pollard, eds. Vox Mystica: Essays on Medieval Mysticism in Honor of Professor Valerie M. Lagorio (Rochester, N.Y.; and Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1995), pp. 99-105.
Traces a strain of Marian mysticism in Chaucer's works, including ABC and several aspects of SNT and PrT.
Boyd, Beverly.
Paul Ruggiers, ed. Editing Chaucer: The Great Tradition (Norman, Okla.: Pilgrim Books, 1984), pp. 13-34.
Summarizes the life of William Caxton and his place at the head of the English printing tradition, providing basic information about fifteenth-century printing, linguistic conditions, and orthographical practice. Focuses on the seven volumes of…
An introduction to "those aspects of Chaucer studies which involve manuscripts and incunabula," designed for classroom use, including discussion of binding, manuscript production and materials, decoration and illumination, paleography, book trade and…
Argues that as he grew older, Chaucer became disenchanted with the affectations of court life and with the mercantile life of his own father and developed an interest in his paternal ancestors who had been provincial taverners in Ipswich in the…
Explores the "predominant secularity" of Chaucer's "attitude" toward the liturgy in his various references to and uses of ecclesiastical calendars, legendaries (saints' lives, hagiographies, or lectionaries), sacramentals, breviaries, missals,…
Revisits Carleton Brown's 1910 suggestion of source relations between the "Alma Redemptoris Mater" in PrT and the "Gaude Maria," offering a liturgical explanation for Chaucer's use of the former.
Boyd, David Lorenzo.
Dissertation Abstracts International 52 (1991): 909A.
On the basis of insights provided by manuscripts (especially Harvard MS English 530), certain works by Hoccleve and Lydgate reveal unifying themes. To fifteenth-century readers, Chaucer's PF treated the relationship of common profit and individual…
Boyd, David Lorenzo.
South Atlantic Quarterly 91 (1992): 945-64.
The placement of Chaucer's PF in MS Bodley 638, MS Laud Misc. 416, and MS Digby 181 suggests that the poem can be interpreted, respectively, as suggesting the value of courtly love, stressing the importance of "proper governance," and illustrating an…
Boyd, David Lorenzo.
Huntington Library Quarterly 58 (1996): 81-97.
The unique ending of CkT in MS Bodley 686 (ca. 1420-1440) reaffirms the preservation of traditional social systems and the obedience that they entail in the face of rising violence and the fear of political and social instability.
Boyd, David Lorenzo.
Peter S. Baker and Nicholas Howe, eds. Words and Works: Studies in Medieval English Language and Literature in Honour of Fred C. Robinson (Toronto, Buffalo, and New York: University of Toronto Press, 1998), pp. 243-60.
In medieval tradition, sodomy was associated with misinterpretation. When seen in this light, Absolon's sodomizing of Nicholas in MilT both reinforces heteronormativity and decries the system upon which it is based. The Miller's reference to "Goddes…
Boyd, David Lorenzo.
Claude J. Summers, ed. The Gay and Lesbian Literary Heritage: A Reader's Companion to the Writers and Their Works, from Antiquity to the Present. Rev. ed. (New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 147-48.
Boyd summarizes the tension in medieval tradition between the promotion of homosocial bonding and the proscription of sodomy. He characterizes Chaucer's treatment of male homosexuality in CT as typically homophobic.
Boyd, Heather.
English Studies in Africa 21 (1978): 65-69.
The rhetorical devices disavowed by the eagle in HF are NPT's substance which mocks badly used rhetoric: misapplied or mechanical or out of place. This mockery lies behind the Nun's Priest's anti-feminism, induced by the airs and graces of the…
Boyd, Jessie Mary Heather.
Dissertation Abstracts International 40 (1980): 4585A.
For Chaucer, a poem was an imaginative focus for the representation of a larger pattern of experience. The patterns created by the opposing figures of speech in his poetry (the concrete and empirical/the archetypal) reflect a complex sense of…
Boyer, Robert H.
Michael B. Lukens, ed. Conflict and Community: New Studies in Thomistic Thought (New York: Peter Lang, 1992), pp. 103-24.
Argues that Thomas Aquinas was a "direct and major source for Chaucer's philosophy," demonstrates the availability of Thomas's work to Chaucer via Merton College, and explores the similiarities between their views of virtue and of the…
The "complex" trouthe/routhe rhyme tracks the stages in the lovers' relationship: from its beginnings, when Troilus's trouthe is pledged for Criseyde's routhe; to its consummation, when mutual compassion assures reciprocal honesty and fidelity; to…
