Browse Items (16376 total)

Treats Boccaccio's "Famous Women," LGW, and Christine de Pizan's "The Book of the City of Ladies," reading Chaucer's "faithful women" in LGW "as metaphors [of] the relationship between authorship and readership, trying to define his own position [as]…

Unpacks allegorical aspects of "domus" (household, community, regulation, tradition, order) and "lingua" (speech, noise, murmuring, poetry, vernacularity) in Gower's "Vox clamantis" and in HF, using Fredric Jameson's notion of "national allegory" to…

Argues that "late medieval dream poets viewed writing as a serious means of therapy, capable of healing both psychological and physiological ailments." Includes discussion of HF where Chaucer combines "performative humor" and "strong sensory imagery"…

Clarifies the late medieval shift from household economics to usurious commerce, and argues that HF, John Lydgate's "Temple of Glass," and Gavin Douglas's "Palice of Honour" depict the "dissolution" of traditional households entailed in this shift.…

Argues that fourteenth-and fifteenth-century dream visions "challenged routine modes of thinking about and being in the world." Chapter 4 includes discussion of stained glass in HF and John Lydgate's "Temple of Glass."

Considers the "floral atmosphere" of the House of Rumor in HF and sees it as a "place of production [that] appears as entwining, encircling vegetation."

Assesses the characterizations of Dido in HF, LGW, and William Caxton's "Eneydos," analyzing their direct discourse and representations of mental state as examples of how premodern authors present well-known figures from the literary past. Chaucer's…

Considers the "authoritative weight" of dreams and visions in literature, focusing on their connections with other forms of prophetic or revelatory texts and offering a taxonomy of varieties. Includes chapters on the biblical Book of Daniel,…

Discusses nominalism, realism, and idealism in "Pearl," "Piers Plowman," and HF, arguing that in the latter nominalism leads to realism.

Explores the language and operation of confession--especially the importance of remembered transgressions--in Chaucer's depictions of love in TC, BD, and MLT, with Troilus, the Black Knight, and Alla as transgressors, and Pandarus, the BD narrator,…

Treats the connections between "mind, body and affect" in BD, KnT, TC, MLT, LGW, and elsewhere, describing classical and medieval theories of breathing, sighing, and swooning as physiological movements of vital spirits. Playing a key role in…

Explores how genre conventions and expectations vary between the Middle Ages and the nineteenth century and produce different views of history. Includes discussion of BD and KnT for the ways that Chaucer reshapes their conventional genres (dream…

Clarifies how students' experiences with grief or loss can be useful in overcoming modern resistance to reading "Pearl," and suggests comparative study of the poem with other texts in Middle English, including BD. Offers discussion questions for…

Examines "how Middle English poets deployed the dream vision genre and the elegiac mode to explore the limitations of language and interrogate the art of poetry." Includes discussion of how in BD the Black Knight's "move from the closed circle of…

Describes "the concept of immersion as seen from cognitive narratology" and the "concept of defamiliarization as seen from unnatural narratology," applying these theoretical constructs to BD, Jorge Luis Borges's "The Circular Ruin," and Franz Kafka's…

Discusses the silence of Chaucer on the life of Boethius in Bo, then moves to examine a fifteenth-century translation of Boethius, based on Bo, that expands and adds to Chaucer's text, including material focused on Boethius himself. Traces and…

Chapter 2 comprises discussion of how "astronomy travelled from Spain to England" and speculation about "how Chaucer might have benefitted [sic] from this collaboration in order to produce" Astr.

Summarizes the attribution and reception of Anel in the early modern period and views the six-line poem appended to Caxton's edition of Anel, known as
"Chaucer's Prophecy," as a source for the Fool's speech in Shakespeare's "King Lear."

Presents a new interpretation of the historical basis of the canon from "Pars secunda" of CYT, while emphasizing Chaucer's own historical context of being at
the center of a network of connections at court and elsewhere.

Treats the concerns of "faith, miracle, and conversion" in SNT, separating the tale from its "putative and absent narrator" and emphasizing its orthodoxy in the relation between faith and understanding, sexuality and marriage, and female deference to…

Analyzes legal, hermeneutic, and social ramifications of murder and murderers in the Middle Ages. Includes Tracy's own essay entitled "'Mordre wol out': Murder and Justice in Chaucer," which focuses on Chaucer's treatment of murder in CT,…

Contextualizes the barnyard chase scene of NPT alongside late medieval hunting treatises, and questions the juxtaposition between the chase and the medieval noble hunt. The parody of this hunt offers multiple layers of meaning, from criticism of the…

Explores the range of representations of animals in English poetry for the ways poems can generate knowledge of animal life and sympathy for it, analyzing animal fables, poems that treat animals generally, species poems, poems about individual…

Argues that in MkT, the Monk proves himself to be not only a reader and interpreter of tragedy, but also a critic of the concept itself.

Considers the performative aspects of Prudence as an allegorical figure in "Sawles Warde," where she functions as a dramatic "expositor," and in Mel, where she offers "commentary . . . on reading, misreading, and the limits of wisdom when it is…