Steinmetz, David C.
Chaucer Review 12 (1977): 38-54.
Griselda's career, when seen in light of the nominalist doctrine of justification known in fourteenth-century Oxford, parallels the pilgrimage of the faithful toward the Heavenly Jerusalem.
Bachman, W. Bryant,Jr.
Chaucer Review 12 (1977): 55-67.
Contrary to prevailing criticism, Dorigien's rash promise is based on the reality of the experiential world. The tension arises when this reality appears an illusion, according to the Boethian concept of reality. When the world is neither real nor…
Besserman, Lawrence L.
Chaucer Review 12 (1977): 68-73.
Chaucer uses wordplay as a device for establishing the Nun's Priest's resentment of his subordination to the Prioress. The Priest disassociates himself from the anti-feminist sentiment of the tale with his final claim "I kan noon harm of no womman…
Establishes that the "Breton" lay is a British lay composed by ancient Britons, not by minstrels of Brittany. The MED gives a British origin for most of its citations of "Britoun" and "Britaine." The validity of the sources for the other citations…
Contrary to Kittredge's view that FrT and SumT are "merely comic interludes" in the marriage group, the Prologues and Tales of the Wife, Friar, and Summoner share a common concern, the debate on "experience" vs. "auctoritee." In questions of…
Beidler, Peter G.
Chaucer Review 12 (1977): 90-102.
Chaucer's unprecedented use of the woman baring her buttocks to the lover's kiss significantly emphasizes both the active potential of the woman, the rejection of courtly traditions,and the association of food with sex. The addition of her fart…
Sands, Donald B.
Chaucer Review 12 (1978): 171-82.
The Wife of Bath is neither a comic figure as Donaldson and others see her, nor a tragic figure as several other critics see her. Instead she is, as Beryl Rowland suggests, a neurotic and a misfit.
Keiser, George R.
Chaucer Review 12 (1978): 191-201.
The arrangement of CT proposed by Henry Bradshaw a century ago solves the problems of geography and the Endlink to MLT which are present in the Ellesmere arrangement. Recent arguments against the Bradshaw shift offer no real evidence to reject it.
In Jungian terms, the experiences of the knight in WBT express a psychic interaction with the mother archetype, leading to the ultimate goal of finding the anima.
D. W. Robertson has already demonstrated the relationship between the Samaritan Woman (Matt. 4:4) and the Wife of Bath. But the similarities are even deeper, extending to an ironic typology of the harlot saved, including Mary Magdalene.
In Mel Chaucer's idiomatic translation from the French of Renaud de Louens skillfully imitates and elaborates the "style clergial," especially in its use of introductory phrases, doublets, subordinate clauses, and trailing sentence structures.
Chaucer freely coins derivations, such as the Summoner's "preambulacion" from "preamble" (D837), for the sake of rhyme, rhythm, economy, and forcefulness.
Morris Halle and Samuel J. Keyser, through careful computer analysis, seem to have put down the myth of the hundred-year-hibernation of Chaucer's decasyllabic line. By studying the stresses and their positions in the line, Halle and Keyser have…
Loschiavo, Linda Ann.
Chaucer Review 13 (1978): 128-32.
Argues for the later date on two counts. First, discrepancies in the records allow only the conclusion that in 1361 Blanche was at least 14 years of age. Second, the custom of early marriage makes plausible that Blanche was only 12 when married in…
Knapp, Peggy Ann.
Chaucer Review 13 (1978): 133-40.
Criseyde's characterization and role in Chaucer's fiction define the way Nature herself looks and functions in the world. Troilus and Pandarus as "priests of Nature" cannot reconcile their image of her with a nature that is "slyding of corage."
Brown, Emerson, Jr.
Chaucer Review 13 (1978): 141-56.
MerT is not just a merry fabliau, uncomplicated by a fictional narrator. Through evidence included in the prologue, most of the first hundred and fifty lines, and various other passages in the work, we see that Chaucer may have consciously tried to…
The dream-frame ("envelope") of PF reveals Chaucer's struggling with the problems of poetic composition, particularly of fusing form and context. The poem's unity is a function of the narrator's stance, more divorced from the poem's subject (Love)…
The Prioress is neither aristocratic, as Bowden, Manly, and Robinson argue, nor classless as Sister Madeleva posits, but a proto-Cockney and, thus, a typically round, contradictory Chaucerian character. With East London associations and dialect (her…
Dame Alice embodies the "bossy woman" who wishes to be mastered in bed, demands freedom outside it, but only finds her ideal in fantasy. Her fourth husband failed to master her in bed; the fifth refused her freedom outside it; only the knight in WBT…
Alice misunderstands the sacramental nature of Christian marriage--which requires perennial mutual affection and joining of wills, not self-centered egoism--creating a serious obstacle to the sacrament's efficacy in producing grace. Alice does not…
Wurtele, Douglas (J.)
Chaucer Review 13 (1978): 66-79.
Alongside January's outright parody of "Canticum Canticorum," a web of allusions thereto sets up an ironic juxtaposition of May and the Virgin Mary, reinforcing the bitterness permeating MerT; these subtle allusions also reflect the Merchant's desire…
Caroline Spurgeon's (1925) attribution of the first German essay on Chaucer to J. J. Eschenburg (1793) is inaccurate. Karl Friedrich Flogel published a short Chaucerian essay a decade earlier in "Geschichte der komischen Literatur" (1784-87). …
In his apprentice years as a poet Chaucer must have spoken and written in French, the language of the court; hence he was commissioned to write BD on the reputation of this (now lost) French poetry. Possibly the memorial was written in English for a…
