Brown, Peter.
Europe: A Literary History, 1348-1418 (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 1:191-207.
Describes late medieval literary production in the city of Canterbury and explores its literary affiliations, ummarizing its place in early English Christianity and the impact of Becket's martyrdom. Highlights works produced in Canterbury or written…
Includes previously published essays on English medieval writers, including Chaucer, Thomas Hoccleve, and Ranulph Higden. Contains one unpublished essay, "Towards a Bohemian Reading of Troilus and Criseyde." Topics are divided into subsections:…
Brown, Peter.
Suzanne Conklin Akbari and James Simpson, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Chaucer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), pp. 11-25.
Details the extant evidence for Chaucer's travel, both in England and abroad, noting that all known travel is for the court, if we define it as "the various royal households with which Geoffrey Chaucer was associated." Explores countries and places…
Brown, Peter.
Peter Brown, ed. A Companion to Medieval English Literature and Culture c. 1350--c.1500 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), pp. 307-21
Explores relations between the late-medieval debate on religious images and imagery in literature, including detailed assessment of the portrait of Chaucer that is included in manuscripts of Thomas Hoccleve's "Regiment of Princes." Assesses the…
Brown, Richard Danson.
Rachel Stenner, Tamsin Badcoe, and Gareth Griffith, eds. Rereading Chaucer and Spenser: Dan Geffrey with the New Poete (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019), pp. 113-36.
Argues that the Spenserian stanza "rebuilds Chaucerian rhyme royal" and that it "demands to be read as a form which takes its syntactic impetus more from rhyme royal than elsewhere." Examines aspects of rime riche, "interconnected" rhymes across…
Twelve chapters assess why so many poets have been drawn to Ovid's Metamorphoses as a source of inspiration. Although its intrinsic richness and complexity provided the original impetus for its popularity, its permeation of so much English literature…
Brown, Sarah Annes.
Translation and Literature 13 (2004): 194-206
Surveys versions and adaptations of the Philomela-Procne-Tereus story from Euripides through Timberlake Wertenbaker's "Love of the Nightingale" (1988), observing overt and submerged motifs of incest and lesbianism. In LGW, the motifs are underscored…
Brown, W[illia]m J.
University of Colorado Studies. Series in Language and Literature 10 (1966): 15-22.
Argues that the dramatic interchange between the Miller and the Reeve in MilP "anticipates every important argument in Chaucer's formal defense" of including the ribald MilT in CT. Together the two "apologies" constitute a "richly comic but…
Brown, William H.,Jr.
Journal of English and Germanic Philology 83 (1984): 492-508.
In TC, Chaucer used the tradition of Joseph of Exeter and Benoit (who had drawn on Dares) to emphasize Troilus's public career rather than his private affairs.
Browne, Megan Palmer.
Carolynn Van Dyke, ed. Rethinking Chaucerian Beasts (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 203-15.
NPT demonstrates the danger of reading "for a single abstract moral" by means of its emphasis on Chauntecleer's humanlike qualities. Among his most human attributes are experiencing and expounding a dream. If "men" refers to both humans and chickens,…
Brownlee, Kevin, and Sylvia Huot, eds.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992.
A collection of essays treating literary approaches to the Roman de la Rose, its iconographic tradition, and its reception in and out of France. Includes a revised reprint of Lee Patterson, "For the Wyves Love of Bathe," SAC 7 (1985), no. 156.
Brownlee, Kevin.
Kevin Brownlee and Marina S. Brownlee, eds. New Perspectives: Studies in Honor of Stephen G. Nichols (New York: Peter Lang, 2022), pp. 277-88.
Argues that both Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun--and their "respective 'poetics'"--are "at issue" in BD 321–34 (where the "Roman de la Rose" is named), and in GP 725–46 ("Chaucer's Apology"). These evince Chaucer's deep, sophisticated, and…
Bruckmann, Patricia.
English Language Notes 18 (1981): 166-70.
Although the tree-vine "topos" with which Chaucer describes the embrace of Troilus and Criseyde is a literary commonplace, it usually describes a relationship that is either destructive or supportive. In TC the "topos" is ambiguous and highlights…
The alchemists' discourse echoes Chaucer's, and one might serve as a "metaphor for the other." Alchemists, like poets, were concerned with interpretations of the written word and with concealment.
Bruhn, Mark Joseph.
Dissertation Abstracts International 57 (1996): 690A.
Study based on theories of Fowler (genre) and Jakobson (metaphor and metonymy) reveals that English verse romance from the thirteenth to the twentieth centuries is typically episodic, with variations attuned to changing intent.
Frisian verse translation of PrPT. A WorldCat record indicates that this was first published in De strikel: Moannebled foar Fryslan (1970), an item not seen.
Brumble, H. David,III.
Explicator 37.1 (1978): 45.
As Meyer Schapiro has noted, the mousetrap, associated with the Prioress in GP 145, is used by Augustine as a symbol of the cross that entraps the devil with the bait of Christ's flesh. The same allegory is found in Peter Lombard's "Sentences."
Brundage, James A.
Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1988.
An exhaustive study of sexual practices and attitudes (both "official" and "popular") and the attempted regulation of sex and marriage under canon law. Chapter 10 deals with the period from 1348 to the Reformation.