Reads the kiss between the Pardoner and the Host at the end of PardT as a challenge to "the repressive binaries of a hermeneutical model based on heterosexual reproduction." The Pardoner inverts dominant ideology, and the kiss brings to readers'…
Burger, Glenn.
Jeffrey Cohen and Bonnie Wheeler, eds. Becoming Male in the Middle Ages (New York and London: Garland, 1997), pp. 480-99.
MilT reproduces the "sadism" of KnT in its assertion of heteronormativity but simultaneously resists this sadism. In the bedroom-window scene, gender is loosened and "queered," enabling readers to escape from the hegemony of masculinist and…
Burger, Glenn.
Peter G. Beidler, ed. Masculinities in Chaucer: Approaches to Maleness in the Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde (Cambridge; and Rochester, N.Y.: D. S. Brewer, 1998), pp. 117-30.
The actions of the Host and the Pardoner in fragment 6 connect PhyT and PardT and their respective tellers, bringing "the male body into view to an extent not seen elsewhere" in CT.
Burger, Glenn.
Glenn Burger and Steven Kruger, eds. Queering the Middle Ages (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), pp. 213-35.
Argues that Chaucer set the standard for discourse on heterosexuality and modernity, even though modern study has written over his "queer touch." Exemplifies the gendered instability of Chaucer's text by contrasting the normativizing power of…
Burger, Glenn.
Robert Myles and David Williams, eds. Chaucer and Language: Essays in Honour of Douglas Wurtele (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2001), pp. 61-70 and 198-203.
Burger follows Gilles Deleuze and Féliz Guattari in associating "mapping" with modernity, resistance, and queerness and associating "tracing" with medieval times, hegemony, and heterosexuality. Explores how Mel can be seen to "map" Melibee's…
Burger explores how MerT scrutinizes developments in class and gender identities and valuations of marital love and subjectivity that grew out of twelfth-century Gregorian Reform. In direct contrast to WBPT (and in response to ClT), the Merchant…
Burger, Glenn.
Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2003.
CT can destabilize essentialist categories of sexuality, subjectivity, and nationality. From a queer and postcolonial perspective, CT enables or compels neither a symbolically simple London originary nor an allegorically closed ending, but rather an…
Burger, Glenn.
Susanna Fein and David Raybin, eds. Chaucer: Contemporary Approaches (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010), pp. 179-98.
Burger characterizes second-wave feminism as a precursor of gay and lesbian studies, arguing that queer theory desires and explores the past in particularized rather than universalized ways, in part to "trouble Foucault's epistemic break between the…
Connects LGW with the "Livre du Chevalier de la Tour Landry" and the "Menagier de Paris." Suggests that the domestic sphere of "Livre du Chevalier de la Tour Landry" and the "Menagier de Paris" offers a place for productive, satisfying love; however,…
Burger, Glenn.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018.
Argues that the "invention" of the good wife in discourses of sacramental marriage, private devotion, and personal conduct "reconfigured how female embodiment was understood." Focuses on conduct texts and manuals written by men for women, including…
Summary description of CT, with comments on Chaucer's life and language, and appreciative analysis of the characterizations of several pilgrims, the conflicts between their tales, and the "eternal relevance" of the work overall. Recommends cinematic…
Item not seen. The WorldCat records indicate that this is a score for three pieces of choral music: the roundel from the conclusion of PF (here titled "Now Welcome"), along with "Sweet Rose of Virtue" by William Dunbar and "Pleasure It Is." by…
Burjorjee, D. M.
Annuale Mediaevale 13 (1972): 14-31.
Surveys nautical imagery and pilgrimage-on-the-sea-of-life metaphors in the sources to TC, and discusses book by book Chaucer's uses of such figures in his poem, especially the sailing heart image, arguing that the varieties of imagery cohere to…
Contemplates issues of determinism and free will in KnT and WBPT. KnT is viewed as "deterministic," which in turn is countered by the Wife, as well as ClT and SNT.
Burke, Kevin J.
James M. Dean, ed. Geoffrey Chaucer (Ipswich, Mass.: Salem Press, 2017), pp. 53-67.
Examines the influence of Boethius on Dante, Boccaccio, and Chaucer. Focuses on how understanding "The Consolation of Philosophy" enhances the "philosophical reflection" and reception of TC for readers.
Burke, Linda.
In R. Barton Palmer and Burt Kimmelman, eds. Machaut's Legacy: The Judgment Poetry Tradition in the Later Middle Ages and Beyond (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2017), pp. 192-216.
Reiterates traditional discussions of similarities between LGW and John Gower's "Confessio Amantis," develops recent arguments of the importance of Anne of Bohemia to both poems (emphasizing Gower's), and uses these connections and others to argue…
Identifies exegetical details in the characterization of Absolon in MilT, helping to identify the clerk with the sins of avarice, lechery, and pride and showing how he is a parody of Robyn the Miller "in the Miller's own tale."
Burkman, Katherine H.
Athens: Ohio University Press, 1978.
Presents two scripts for "teaching through performance": 1) an adaptation of scenes from several of Shakespeare's plays, presented as a single playscript ("Shakespeare's Mirror"); and 2) a fusion of reduced, modernized versions of MilT, PrT, WBPT,…
Burlin, Robert B.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977.
Chaucer's fictions show a logical development. The first are the "poetic fictions." In exploring the idea of authorial experience, the dream visions speculate on the poet's reaction to his audience and on the value of poetic activity. The second…
Burlin proposes a structuralist model for the medieval romance, adopting a Saussurean paradigm of intersecting axes: the "paradigmatic axis furnished with the test and courtly codes and the syntagmatic axis with the quest and the test." Includes…
Describes the Franklin's grasping "imitation of noble ways" in FranPT and in his GP description. The genre and rhetoric of the Tale are outdated, absurd, and/or obtrusive, while its depictions of ideals of marriage, gentility, and patience are either…
Burlin, Robert B., and H. Marshall Leicester, Jr.
PMLA 95 (1980): 880-82.
An exchange of letters in the PMLA Forum section that comment on textuality, narrative "absence," narrative "presence," and their usefulness in discussing "voice" in GP.
Burnet, R. A. L.
Notes and Queries 227 (1982): 115-16.
Although Ann Thompson's "Shakespeare's Chaucer: A Study in Literary Origins" explores parallels between TC and LGW and "The Merchant of Venice," it does not note the Chaucerian echoes in Portia's warning of Bassanio (5.1.23Off.), which is similar to…
Burnley, David,and Matsuji Tajima.
Woodbridge, Suffolk; and Rochester, N.Y.: D. S. Brewer, 1994.
An annotated bibliography of 1,335 studies, arranged chronologically (1865-1900) within three broad categories: Early Middle English, Later Middle English, and dissertations. Includes studies in which "linguistic description has been used to cast…
