In HF, concerned with the nature of poetry, Chaucer reflects fourteenth-century culture, reveals his debts to Dante and Boccaccio (Lollius), and deals with literature.
Carruthers, Mary J.
Chaucer Review 17 (1983): 221-34.
Some medieval readers or hearers would have considered ClT incredible or cruel. The Clerk agrees with the Wife that gentilesse means "trouthe," fidelity and integrity.
Merrix, Robert P.
Chaucer Review 17 (1983): 235-49.
"Modern" medieval sermons, as contrasted with patristic sermons, are not structurally rigid, but PardT follows agreed-upon elements and sequences of material and relates theme to form.
In Chaucer's day the Epistle was regarded as canonical. In James 3.3-10, the theme is the tongue, the use and abuse of language--the theme not only of the Manciple's mother's advice but of the tale itself.
Bloomfield, Morton W.
Chaucer Review 17 (1983): 286-91.
Folklorists describe liminal tales as experiences that are part of a rite of passage from one realm of experience to another. Viewed thus, FrT assumes new complexities: it reflects the total pilgrimage experience of CT.
Gaylord. Alan T.
Chaucer Review 17 (1983): 300-315.
By deliberate excision lines 1188-1203 of LGW can be reduced from decasyllables to octosyllables, illustrating the different effects of the lines, especially the longer "breath" of the decasyllable.
Heffernan, Carol Falvo.
Chaucer Review 17 (1983): 332-40.
Walter and Griselda embody qualities to be found in medieval discussions of tyrants and "commune profit," but they go beyond abstract ideas as characters in their own right.
Chaucer's punning in ShT is complex, some puns depending upon the eye ("tale," "tallynge") and others upon the ear alone. The Shipman imports into English a foreign form (the fabliau) and foreign (especially French) financial words "that hadden…
An automaton "who is both theologically and in ordinary human terms...dead," the Pardoner, whose sexuality emphasizes his deadness, may yet be redeemed in the words of the Old Man.
Psychoanalytical criticism provides an unsatisfactory view of BD. The structure is rhetorical and Chaucer "leaves the dialectic unresolved, the syllogism of consolation incomplete."
Latin, rather than OF, sources, especially the twelfth-century "Isengrimus," provide parallels with NPT. The fifteenth-century Low German "De vos und de hane" was derived orally from the "Isengrimus." Possibly Chaucer heard an analogous English…
The problem of ascertaining Chaucer's audience(s) is complex, running from the fictional one of GP to the real audiences of the poet's day to the audiences of the present.
The poems to Scogan, Bukton, and Vache, and those to Richard II and Henry IV provide evidence of the makeup of the audience, with whom the poet shared an interest in good manners and good humor.
Birds as the participants in the "demande d'amour" game are comic, as is Nature the judge: her ineptness is both risible and serious, as traditionally she is limited by the Fall.