HF is a satire on Dante's procedures of damnation and on his Virgilianism. LGW and TC should not be read ironically but should be seen as continuations of the damnation debate with Dante that began with HF.
A. A. MacDonald's objection to reading "woman" for "wo man" in line 847 of MLT is a misunderstanding of a more fundamental problem--that traditional attitudes toward gender may have played a part in separating two letters in a context wherein certain…
Owen, Charles A.,Jr.
Chaucer Review 23 (1988): 1-29, 95-116.
The record of surviving manuscripts shows three patterns in the production of collections of CT: the gathering in of examplars for the specific occasion; the use as exemplar of an already written manuscript of CT; and the use of a collection of…
Wurtele, Douglas J.
Chaucer Review 23 (1988): 117-28.
If Jankyn and Alison conspired at the death of the Wife's fourth husband, the books from which Jankyn reads possibly contain lessons to murderesses. Her anger and threat of revelation result in his capitulation and flight, leaving her to purvey her…
Robertson, D. W.,Jr.
Chaucer Review 23 (1988): 129-39.
The Physician's misunderstanding of his tale adds to the comedy of CT. He concludes the tale with a warning to forsake sin, not realizing that--like Appius, who betrays the innocence of Virginia--he betrays the innocence of those who come to him "in…
The 1987 report of the Committee on Chaucer Bibliography and Research lists 354 Chaucer studies. Listings are devoted primarily to Americian Chaucerians.
Guthrie, Steven R.
Chaucer Review 23 (1988): 30-49.
While Chaucer's line is iambic pentameter, it differs from Renaissance pentameter by virtue of a French Romance presence so strong as to constitute a motive rhythmic force in the poetry.
Chaucer's use of an identifiable late-Gothic portrait technique can be seen by comparing one of the most familiar portraits of GP--the Prioress--with a roughly contemporary sculptural portrait of Philippa of Hainault. These late-Gothic portraits…
Condren, Edward I.
Chaucer Review 23 (1989): 192-218.
Despite the crossed purposes of the Prioress's secular and religious impulses, each impulse paradoxically reaches fruition in PrT. In creating the young boy as an innocent so like herself and then describing his martyrdom with the particular…
Kruger, Steven F.
Chaucer Review 23 (1989): 219-35.
LGWP promises something that the poem itself does not deliver--stories of faithful women and faithless men. LGW is about how stories break out of prescribed patterns, how characters defy stereotypes, and how emotions and impulses escape the forms…
The tale of Orpheus is a tragic love story used to convey the central moral lesson of Boethius's "Consolation," a lesson corresponding to the "moralitee" spelled out in the epilogue to Chaucer's TC. Both the Orpheus metrum and Chaucer's poem have a…
By skewing their narrative deployment, Chaucer simultaneously undermines the viability of heroic and courtly romance themes in FranT and reevaluates their relationship to lived human experience. He does so through narrative pacing, repression and…
Analysis of typical scholarly and critical comment on GP reveals that the common practice of assuming a context for the pilgrims' daily lives has some unsatisfactory consequences. Chaucer creates a fiction of travel to free the pilgrims from the…
Mel and Th function together to create a game that shows and explores how author and audience together manipulate and receive language in the creation of a text.
Stevenson, Kay Gilliland.
Chaucer Review 24 (1989): 1-19.
In BD, Chaucer examines the reader and the poet within the fiction of his narrative, while at the same time rereading and rewriting contemporary French poets.
The lack of a defined perspective from which to judge exposes a profound ambivalence in the Merchant, an ambivalence that manifests itself in a series of confusing and disconcerting shifts in narrative viewpoint, suggesting a narrator who is quite…
Woods, William F.
Chaucer Review 24 (1989): 139-49.
The social background of ShT offers a rationale for the actions of the characters, especially of the wife. Her struggle to achieve parity in her mercantile marriage transforms her into a reflection of her husband. The monk, who is a "competing…
Machan, Tim William.
Chaucer Review 24 (1989): 150-62.
That the Bo scribes altered their text in a number of substantive ways suggests that the "Consolatione" was not a fixed text but a living tradition. This tradition became even more diverse whenever the "Consolatione" was translated. The implication…
MkT is very likely a virtually unrevised early poem, the first to be written after Chaucer's return from Italy in 1372 and his first collection of stories. As such, it deserves a separate existence, as Chaucer's early poem 'De casibus vivorum…
PF arranges its source materials in the dream narrative to repeat the fall from unity represented schematically by the universal disequilibrium in Cicero's "Dream of Scipio".
In WBP and WBT, Chaucer dramatizes a powerful reorientation of tradition. In the endings of both, Alison images a reconciliation that awards women justification and a degree of self-definition, without injuring men. The comic genre of CT does not…
