A popular history of the George Inn, Southwark, located next to where the Tabard once stood. Includes various references to the Tabard Inn in history and in CT, and includes a chapter called "The Poet's Tale, Or, How English Literature Was Born in a…
Brown, Peter, and Andrew Butcher.
Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991.
Examines CT within the social and political life of the later fourteenth century. Chaucer had an unusually assimilative, syncretic, and integrative imagination, but he lived at a time of disintegrating social and religious forms and values. He was…
Brown, Peter, and Darryll Grantley, eds.
London: Yorick, 1987.
Produced to accompany a dramatic presentation of adapted versions of selections from CT. Includes comments on adapting the tales and directing the adaptations, accompanying music, parallels with medieval drama, medieval cooking, the "Tale of Beryn,"…
Brown, Peter, and Jan Čermák, eds.
Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2023.
Eleven essays by various authors on topics in the social, literary, and cultural relations between England and Bohemia in the late fourteenth century, embodied in the marriage between Richard II and Anne of Bohemia. The introduction by the editors…
Twenty-nine essays on the literary, social, political, and geographical contexts within which Chaucer produced his work, as well as his response to contemporary ideologies. Each essay includes a survey of existing scholarship in a given area,…
Thirty-eight essays by various authors, arranged in seven subheadings: "Overviews"; "The Production and Reception of Texts"; "Language and Literature"; "Encounters with Other Cultures"; "Special Themes"; "Genres"; "and Readings." Each essay includes…
Revised edition of A Companion to Chaucer (2000) with thirty-six new and revised chapters: Candace Barrington and Jonathan Hsy, "Afterlives"; Andrew Galloway, "Auctorite"; Jane Griffiths, "Biography; Linda Ehrsam Voight, "Bodies"; Alfred Thomas,…
Brown, Peter, Stuart Hutchinson, and Michael Irwin.
Canterbury: Yorick Books, 1990.
Contains sixteen short, illustrated chapters, thematically arranged and based on upwards of fifty authors from Bede to Virginia Woolf who wrote about Canterbury. "'The Holy Blisful Martyr'" covers Erasmus, Stanley, Tennyson, and T. S. Elliot, while…
Brown, Peter,and Andrew Butcher.
Literature and History 13 (1987): 1-13.
Teaching CT at the undergraduate level both as literature and as social and political history challenges student responses, questions the idea of Chaucerian character, and raises methodological problems.
Brown, Peter.
Julia Boffey and Janet Cowen, eds. Chaucer and Fifteenth-Century Poetry. King's College London Medieval Studies, no. 5 (London: King's College Centre for Late Antique and Medieval Studies, 1991), pp. 143-74.
Examines the details and style of Beryn, arguing that it was written to complete CT and that it capitalizes on several of its narrative and stylistic features. Suggests that Beryn was composed by a monk of Christ Church, Canterbury, perhaps in…
Following the example set in V. A. Kolve's Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative, Brown develops the mimetic and iconographic relations of the prison in KnT and the castle in Roman de la Rose.
Brown, Peter.
Paul Strohm and Thomas J. Heffernan, eds. Studies in the Age of Chaucer, Proceedings, No. 1, 1984 (Knoxville, Tenn.: New Chaucer Society, 1985), pp. 231-43.
Three medieval optical authorities possibly known by Chaucer--Alhazen, Witelo, and Bartholomew--provide parallels for the visual deceptions at the end of MerT, which reflect the medieval tradition of "perspectiva."
Brown, Peter.
Ph.D. diss., 1981. University of York, England.
Medieval universities taught "perspectiva," or optics, important in literary realism. Chaucer's use of light, vision, and space parallels passages in optical texts and becomes thematic in CT, fragments G and A. Jean de Meun, Dante, and Boccaccio…
The conception of the action of RvT in three dimensions is designed to provide more than narrative realism. By reducing the miller's area of influence, Chaucer represents metaphorically his being cut down to size by the students.
An "interactive" introduction to CT designed for classroom use. Provides for GP and select tales contextual materials from sources and analogues, rhetorical and visual traditions, and contemporary resources, guiding students in their considerations…
Brown, Peter.
Peter Brown, ed. Reading Dreams: The Interpretation of Dreams from Chaucer to Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 22-50.
Argues that Middle English dream visions from the second half of the fourteenth century allowed writers to experiment with altered states of consciousness and liminality. Discusses French and Middle English dream visions, including BD, HF, LGW, and…
Brown, Peter.
Oxford : Oxford University Press, 1999.
Six essays by various authors on dreams in medieval and early modern literature. For four essays that pertain to Chaucer, search for Reading Dreams under Alternative Title.
Questions the traditional gloss of "shot wyndowe," arguing that the words refer to a window that opens inward, that is unglazed, and that, in MilT, is a window to a privy.
Brown, Peter.
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 27 (2005): 261-67.
Brown describes a "recent crisis" that threatened the survival of the Canterbury Centre for Medieval and Tudor Studies at the University of Kent at Canterbury.
Brown, Peter.
Oxford and New York : Peter Lang, 2007.
Brown traces classical and medieval study of optics in various kinds of writing, arguing that in the late Middle Ages the science of "perspectiva" became part of intellectual consciousness, influencing Chaucer and several of his models (Jean de Meun,…
