A variorum editor should record "fully and impartially, the history of what people have 'thought' that his author wrote and meant." And he "should not 'editorialize' at all."
Argues for a pun on nonce-word "ape-ese." The Cook has drunk "wyn ape." If appease (ad pacem) is merely ape-ease, then clearly wine is no real remedy for the pilgrims' dis-ease ("whan that they were seke").
In the Merchant and MerT Chaucer objectifies his own cultural bias against women and his own interest in financial profit. The Merchant is like January (Janus was the god of merchants), and Chaucer (born into a family of merchants) is like the…
The WBT and its analogues have in common the archetype of transformation from ugly age to beautiful and fertile youthfulness. The psychic transformation of unconsciousness to consciousness, a phenomenon central to human individual and collective…
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.
Psychoanalytic analysis of WBT and ClT, reading the two as parallel transformation stories. The first "seems to commemorate the event of the separation of consciousness"; in the second, Griselda "achieved individuation by recognizing her animus."…
Brown, George H.
James M. Dean and Christian Zacher, eds. The Idea of Medieval Literature: New Essays on Chaucer and Medieval Culture in Honor of Donald R. Howard (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1992), pp. 285-300.
Medieval uses of the Bible include imitation, satire, and parody. Chaucer's biblical quotations and allusions, which number more than seven hundred, are used to prove a proposition, to reinforce a statement, to enhance some personage, to criticize a…
Brown, James Neil.
Massachusetts Studies in English 2 (1970): 71-79.
Characterizes the narrator of BD as a comic "would-be courtier" who takes pains to "appear courtly and noble and in love." The narrator is also likeable and much in awe of the Black Knight, functioning as a device whereby Chaucer censures excessive…
Maintains that the characterizations of the Monk in GP and in MkPT are consistent, and attributes their differing tones to the Monk's decision to "change his image" in the eyes of his fellow pilgrims while requiting the Host's derision with the…
Brown, Melissa L.
David Chamberlain, ed. New Readings of Late Medieval Love Poems (Lanham, Md.; New York; and London: University Press of America, 1993), pp. 119-43.
Thought to be the work of Chaucer until 1775, Roos's translation clarifies the role of the Lover as a "woful lover." The humor and criticism of the poem are aimed at the Lover, not the Lady.
Brown, Muriel.
Michelle Sauer, ed. Proceedings of the 11th Annual Northern Plains Conference on Early British Literature (Minot, N.D.: Minot State University, 2003), pp. 82-89.
Brown approaches the loathly lady's sermon on "gentillesse" as political allegory, emphasizing "the transforming power of relinquishing control over those who work, the third estate."
Brown, Murray L.
Mediaevalia 11 (1989, for 1985): 219-44.
Conjectures that, while Deschamps may have met Chaucer in 1360, his "Ballade to Chaucer" was probably written in 1391 and reflects the association of Chaucer and Deschamps with the Order of the Passion of Jesus Christ in the late 1380s and early…
Brown, Murray.
R. Barton Palmer, ed. Chaucer's French Contemporaries: The Poetry/Poetics of Self and Tradition (New York: AMS Press, 1999), pp. 187-215
Deschamps's "Ballade" dates from Sir Lewis Clifford's diplomatic mission to the French court in 1391, when France and England were closer to peace than they had been in almost a decade. Both Chaucer and Deschamps were associated with the Order of the…
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.
