Describes how visual aids and a trip to a medieval collection in a museum (in this instance the Kress collection in Birmingham, Alabama) can help students confront medieval literature with greater depth and involvement.
In addition to overt allusions to law and its practitioners and his depictions of legal proceedings, Chaucer weaves legal terminology into his texts and uses "embedded" references to real court cases in developing his plots and characters. Advocates…
Braswell, Mary Flowers.
Chaucer Review 39 (2005): 402-19
Haweis's two books--Chaucer for Children (1877) and Chaucer for Schools (1881)--reveal much about Victorian Chaucerians, their conversations, and their research. A scholarly popularizer, Haweis supported Chaucer's reputation during the formative…
A series of essays and translations written between 1877 and 1886, Mary Eliza Haweis's work on MilT constitutes a large and uniquely positive chapter in the reception of MilT in Victorian England.
Braswell, Mary Flowers.
Austin Sarat, Cathrine O. Frank, and Matthew Anderson, eds. Teaching Law and Literature (New York: Modern Language Association, 2011), pp. 155-61.
Offers a pedagogical unit in which advanced students explore similarities between CT (especially GP) and manor court records, capitalizing on Chaucer's familiarity with legal proceedings. Suggests that the "manor court seems to have influenced…
Braswell, Mary Flowers.
Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2016
New York: Routledge, 2017.
A critical biography of Haweis that emphasizes her work as a Chaucer scholar, critic, editor, and illustrator, explaining her accomplishments in relation to the better-known Chaucerians of the nineteenth century and exploring why her influence is not…
Bratcher, James T.
Notes and Queries 208 (1963): 210-12.
Quotes and translates an analogue to the window scene of bottom kissing in MilT, recorded by folklorist Juan B. Rael as "La mujer y los tres amantes," collected by oral transmission from Félix Pino in New Mexico in the 1930s.
Bratcher, James T.
Notes and Queries 208 (1963): 444-45.
Suggests that the "greyn" placed on the clergeon's tongue in PrT 7.662 is, ironically, a "breath sweetener," one of several satiric details observed in the Tale.
Bratcher, James T., and Nicholai von Kreisler.
Southern Folklore Quarterly 35 (1971): 325-35.
Assesses narrative suspension and crossing motivations in MilT and three analogous U.S. version of the "misdirected-kiss and branding story," including two folktales and George Milburn's "Old John's Woman" (also titled "Julie"; 1956). Suggests that…
Bravo [García], Antonio, ed.
[Oviedo]: Universidad de Oviedo, Servicio de Publicaciones, 1998.
This anthology of Middle English writing includes MilT and PardT(edited from the Ellesmere manuacript), with facing-page glosses and a brief introduction.
An anthology of four tales of cuckoldry, with a brief Introduction. Includes a version of ShT in Spanish, here titled "Vestida de Pecado: Versión Libre Sobre un Cuento de Geoffrey Chaucer" (pp. 37-65).
Brawer, Robert A.
New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1998.
Chapter two, "Selling on a Grand Scale, Playing to an Image-Conscious Society" (pp. 35-59), includes discussion of the Merchant as a "self-made man" who relies on his image of success. Assesses the GP description and compares the character to Horatio…
Forum letter in which Braxton, disagreeing with Pamela Michaela Paasche, claims that closure is evident in Chaucer's works when his male point of view is recognized, and presents MerT as a "case in point."
Breckenridge, Jay Rankin.
Dissertation Abstracts International 45 (1985): 2868A.
A sixty-year-old Chaucer is represented as reading from his works to students at an English school, digressing for audience understanding; includes commentary, playscript, and videotaped reading for beginning students of Chaucer.
Breckenridge, Jay.
Pennsylvania English 15:1 (1990): 37-48.
Breckenridge discusses his stage dramatization of Geoffrey Chaucer and the problems regarding Chaucer's life and personality engendered by life records and critical appraisal of Chaucer the man and Chaucer the persona.
Breckenridge, Sarah Dee.
Dissertation Abstracts International A75.04 (2014): n.p.
Examines a series of English literary texts in which "the portrayal of landscape does both elegiac and political work." Includes CT, which "represents a new sphere of civic and economic movement within established space."
In calling the GP Miller a "knarre," Chaucer probably draws on an iconographic tradition illustrated in a pilgrim badge depicting a boar playing a bagpipe and inscribed "Laet knorren."
Breen, Katharine.
Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Describes late medieval efforts to "formulate vernacular languages that could stand in for Latin grammar as a first and paradigmatic 'habitus'," i.e., as a rule-based discipline of the mind that shapes cognition and moral action. Dante, the…
Breen, Katharine.
Steven Rozenski, Joshua Byron Smith, and Claire M. Waters, eds. Mystics, Goddesses, Lovers, and Teachers: Medieval Visions and Their Modern Legacies. Studies in Honour of Barbara Newman (Turnhout: Brepols, 2023), pp. 239-65.
Treats Fame's dual nature as goddess and personification in Hesiod, Aeschines, Virgil, and HF. While Chaucer's character echoes the duality of its predecessors, she is not a goddess--"never characterized as a bride or daughter of the Christian…
Proposes that "upon the viritoot," often glossed as "to be astir," actually means "fairy toot," a common topological expression from England. This second meaning suggests that Gervase the smith, speculating on why the angry Absolon has appeared to…
Traces the medieval legend and cult of Saint Loy the horsesmith, especially from British sources; identifies references to the saint in GP and FrT. Two gazetteers assemble artistic and cultural evidence for the legend in Europe and the British…
Breeze, Andrew.
Notes and Queries 237 (1992): 441-45.
"Bear the bell" (TC 3.198) is best explained through a Welsh phrase in Dafydd ap Gwilym referring to falconry. Falcons wore bells, and the phrase meant "to be pre-eminent."
