Browse Items (16369 total)

Four stanzas that seem out of place in the conclusion can be removed and reinserted, resulting in improved syntactic and thematic continuity. There is no manuscript authority for the mistaken position (all manuscripts have the order of the received…

Reader theory helps us better appreciate LGW: the schema trust/doubt/questioning/self-reliance reveals subtle complexities in the relationships among reader, poet, and moral and literary traditions.

The verse is heightened by consonant repetition and reversal; rhyme; and assonance.

In ManT, Chaucer gives us no information about the crow's personality, motives, or style. He and the Manciple have paradigmatic significance as users of speech and tellers. However, the poet does focus on the narratorial personality of the…

Chaucer works with a poetic genre; within it, however, he directs his attention to a specific occasion, probably Richard II's difficulties with royal prerogative in 1387.

KnT's structure is paratactic, and the end is repeatedly called for but not brought into being. As a result, the ending is merely a ceasing of action, not closure, which would satisfy our need for aesthetic and philosophical completeness.

Though the "Envoy" is in Chaucer's late, masterly style, there is no need to equate the two voices (Chaucer's, the Clerk's). The "carnival" tone of the lines (in M. M. Bakhtin's sense) is appropriate to the Clerk in his "playful, ironic student"…

Excavations in 1919-21 reveal that Sarai, in the Volga region of southeastern Russia, was an exotic metropolis combining Byzantine and Mongolian splendor. Its artisans produced rings and mirrors, and its Mongol warriors covered their horses with…

PhyT has been undervalued; it is meant to be read in conjunction with the two that precede and follow it. A comparison with Gower's version and with Chaucer's similar story of Lucrece elucidates the tale. Virginia's character is brought into focus…

Following the precepts of Russian formalism, one perceives that along with other related words, "deeth" and "sleeth" give unity to PardT. The word-complex is also associated with the Pardoner's sterility.

Chaucer's line "Betynge with his heles on the grounde" (LGW 863) echoes Geoffrey's description of Frollo's death ("Historia regum Britanniae" 9.9) and in turn suggests that Chaucer viewed Geoffrey's work with skepticism.

Chaucer makes his commentary on alchemy by presenting the Yeoman as a simple, plain man. While in most of his works the poet inserts an absolute point of view, here he looks at the physical world from a physical point of view.

In his "Teatro d'huomini letterati" (1647), Gerolamo Ghilini includes a sketch of Chaucer's life and works based on John Pits's "Relationem historicarum de rebus anglicis" (Paris, 1619). Errors and omissions demonstrate that Ghilini depended wholly…

Listings by topic and work, with an alphabetical index of authors.

Terry Jones, in "Chaucer's Knight: Portrait of a Medieval Mercenary" (1980), maintains that Chaucer criticizes the Knight and his motives and expects his audience to join him. Evidence shows, however, that the Knight is portrayed sympathetically…

Lydgate's "Troy Book" describes the classical theater as a semicircle with a raised pulpit in the midst. This is what is portrayed in the Corpus Christi College (Cambridge) manuscript: finely dressed figures mime the roles of the principals while…

Frequent proverbs prevent the discovery of true comfort. The reader is "distanced" from the events in KnT and reminded that true "solaas" is found only through very long, very difficult, and individual struggle.

A survey of the financial and legal records of Chaucer's life from 1385 to 1400 leaves an impression of Chaucer as a cautious nonpartisan.

Troilus's failure to speak up against the exchange of Criseyde underlines his timidity in society and ultimately his moral cowardice.

The public ceremonies--the triumph, trial by battle, and the state funeral--underlining the Knight's conversion of romance into figurative narrative suggest that the public personality of Theseus, the ruler, is the dominant personality in KnT.

Walter is not just testing his wife but doing the worst he can imagine himself doing as a stage in achieving a better unity among the parts of himself and between his private and public selves.

Examines the "Beryn"-writer's "interpretation of Chaucerian style" and narrative devices such as framing and indeterminacy.

John C. Hirsh's proposed emendation of "wo man" to "woman" in MLT 847 is probably unwarranted. Consideration of manuscript evidence, as well as syntax and cultural context, render Hirsh's reading implausible.

By establishing a truer picture of the fourteenth-century Inns of Court, we can see the improbability of Chaucer's having been educated there. First, Chaucer's education at the Inns of Court is questionable. Second, the fourteenth-century Inns of…

The issues raised by the narrative style of BD, particularly in the use of its ambivalent first-person narrator, suggest Chaucer's early interest in an art that maintains a tension between convention and innovation.