Browse Items (16369 total)

Composed in the context of the bubonic plague, BD encourages rejection of despair.

Studies the literacy, education, and cultural milieu of Chaucer's audience, the courtly circle and the upper socioeconomic echelons, especially the GP portrait of the Pardoner and PardT, to suggest reader response based on theories of Iser,…

Reviews criticism of ShT as it relates to the history of accounting, arguing that Chaucer scholars would benefit from deeper familiarity with the subject. In Chaucer scholarship, descriptions of historical accounting practices are less precise and…

HF classifies memory as an aspect of Prudence, as reflected in its three-part structure and reinforced by its thematic meditation on fame. GP portraits develop with details of "artificial" memory, as do the pilgrimage itself and the game. KnT…

The levels of style of the first three Canterbury tales correspond to John of Garland's columnar figure, which is itself a memory locus derived from classical rhetoric.

Using the three parts of the "virtue of Providence" as the basis for the three-book structure of HF, Chaucer implies that, although time moves forward through history, the past,present, and future exist all at once.

Argues that Chaucer "experiments with the body-disabling power of music as a site of poetic potential," tallying how, in CT, "musical performance nearly always causes narrative tension" and music "prosthetizes disability"--"advental" insofar as it…

Shows that "actuarial forms of thinking" underlie the CT, particularly the tale-telling contest, the opening and closing of the GP, sea-trade and risk in the GP descriptions of the Merchant and the Shipman, and associative links nbetween mercantilism…

Shows how Biblical narratives underlie the CT, not only allusively but in narrative plots and figural schema, focusing on how materials from Genesis are present in GP (springtime creation), KnT (brotherly conflict similar to Cain and Abel), MilT…

The CT are seen as a single unit. In particular, Mel and MLT are analyzed in the light of Marsilio of Padua's "Defensor Pacis" and Wyclif's religious position.

Focuses on Mel as the central and unifying section of CT, reading it as an expression of Chaucer's preference for unvarnished moralism over poetry.

Addresses performance texts associated with the early Elizabethan Inns of Court ("closet dramas, translations, masques, and orations"), arguing that they reflect four Chaucerian "paradigms of play" ("Chaucerian Self-Fashioning," "Chaucerian…

Applies the thought of Bernard of Clairvaux to issues of human action and subjection to God and law, as seen in ClT, MLT, KnT, FrT, and PhyT. Argues that a fuller understanding of Chaucer's "religious background" is essential to interpretation of his…

Dorigen in FranT has more than the two options of shame or death: she can also choose to break a bad law, even though the decision to let bad law stand "seems somehow, tragically, to have been taken long before the characters became conscious of…

Argues that Chaucer's claim in LGW that St. Augustine "hath gret compassioun / Of this Lucresse" is neither ironic nor misinformed, but is an accurate account of Augustine's position. Situating Augustine's comments about Lucretia within the broader…

Explores the concept of "cooperative" or "conjoint" agency in Chaucer's works to examine ideas "about the transition from the Middle Ages to modernity." Examines the notion of passivity in the works of Chaucer and Bernard of Clairvaux, as well as…

Attributes Chaucer's assertion of St. Augustine's "gret compassioun" for Lucrece as a rape victim (LGW, 1691) to the poets' unmediated first-hand knowledge of Book I of the "City of God," clarifying Augustine's sympathy for rape victims, arguing that…

The Prioress by omitting the passage which extolls King David in Psalm 8 betrays herself as ignorant of history. The Friar in blending vv.8-9 of Psalm 10 omits passages which chastise the aggrandisement of the friars at the expense of the poor. …

Explores the phallic imagery of MerT, particularly the innuendoes in "clyket" and "twiste."

Considers the authorship and manuscript provenance of a French version of the tale of Melibee, an analogue of Mel.

Comments on issues of complaint and consent in two essays included in this volume of SAC, linking the medieval past with the present. Includes response to Micah James Goodrich, "The Yeoman's Canon: On Toxic Mentors."

Examines intertextual relations between CT and Ackroyd's "Clerkenwell Tales," acknowledging the dependencies of the latter, but emphasizing its postmodernist techniques and themes.

Assesses the literary conventions and intellectual context of "The Court of Love," a sixteenth-century poem thought to be by Chaucer until the twentieth century. Emphasizes early modern modifications of medieval amatory verse, and includes comments…

In Gower's version of the Constance story, incest is a metaphor for the relationship between the Church and the crown, a means to critique the two. In contrast, MLT "tries to avoid suggesting any tension between lay and clerical power."

Studies the incest motif in Confessio Amantis as a "fundamental element" in Gower's explorations of father-daughter relationships and the relationships of authority. In this context, Bullón-Fernández considers Chaucer's MLT and PhyT as analogues…