Browse Items (16369 total)

Discusses the sociomoral and aesthetic qualities that constitute courtly speech, including social attitude, voice quality, brevity, plainness of speech, and sensitivity and understanding. Based on passages spoken "curteisly" in Chaucer, Burnley's…

Offers more adequate definitions than previously suggested of psychological terms Chaucer derives from his French sources for BD, particularly "turnen into malice," "to mochel knowlechyng," "wyt so general," "pure suffraunt...wyt."

Reconstructs some features of the stylistic "architecture" of Chaucer's language and illustrates its exploitation in the GP description of the Prioress. The portrait may be more critical, less ambiguous, and less sympathetic than is usually assumed.

Provides apparatus for interpreting Chaucer's text, placing his language in its wider contemporary context, and studies differences in grammar between Chaucerian and Modern English, sentence linkage and scribal punctuation, the dialectal status of…

Inflexional final -"e" is well preserved in earliest Chaucer MSS. Hengwrt is conservative; Ellesmere is less correct and thus probably later.

Burnley describes progress to date, suggesting how the textbase can illuminate the "linguistic architecture" of Chaucer and his contemporaries, e.g., Chaucer's use of final -"e", his lexicon and style, and his relation to his contemporaries.

Comments on scribal habits reflected in late-medieval English manuscripts and assesses the utility of electronic hypertext to record variations, using examples from Chaucer and other Middle English authors.

Explores Chaucer's literary self-consciousness by tabulating and analyzing his wide-ranging and complex variety of literary terms, including terms that describe the process of writing and the impact of literature, as well as terms of genre, rhetoric,…

Historical survey of the language and actions of courtly behavior as evident in Anglo-Norman and Middle English writings, with some corroboration from Latin. Traces the emergence of aristocratic courtliness in the eleventh century through to its…

Reassesses details of Chaucer's Scog and of Scogan's Moral Balade in light of their historical context, intertextual relations, manuscript variants, and scribal graffiti, arguing that Scogan's poem reflects familiarity with several of Chaucer's…

Describes the "difficulties faced by scholars in unraveling" the complications involved in the usage and nuances of meaning of late Middle English you /thou pronouns, with particular attention to Chaucer's works, Eustace Deschamps' address to…

Drawing on recent socio- and ethnolinguistic insights, Burnley examines the complex stylistic associations of commonly used language in a variety of spoken and written contexts. The structure of Chaucer's English is not neat and orderly but…

The wording of MerT has many echoes, some heretofore unidentified, of medieval marriage services. Suggestions of the Christian ideal are thus juxtaposed to the characters' perverse misunderstandings of marriage throughout the tale, providing an…

The literary history of the horse Bayard suggests that Chaucer's point in the reference is to underscore "a lack of providence" in Troilus conduct.

In sociolinguistic terms, Burnley examines orthography among literary scribes of Chaucer's day to find that spelling was far from standardized.

Chaucer's characters are not psychologically consistent but (like the Host, or Pardoner) are illusions based on familiar voices and attitudes to engage the audience in moral concerns, as in MerT, PardT.

Stresses the need to reconcile literary and linguistic approaches.

A review of the allusions to rhetoric in London poets of Chaucer's time fails to reveal a single firsthand reference to an original text. Rhetorical concepts contributed indirectly to their conceptions of poetry and gave the poets an air of literary…

Argues that the phrase "slydynge of corage" used to characterize Criseyde's moral character refers to "infirmity of resolve" but also involves unstable affections.

The medieval tyrant "topos," with its lexicon and its various transformations, provides the means of studying Chaucer's moral vocabulary. The tyrant figure embodies passion, cruelty, injustice, and the heartlessness. Its antitype is first that of…

Although Chaucer's use of "termes" ranges from simple pun or word play to the emergence of an elaborate figurative pattern, his basic technique makes certain words gain power from use, context, and collocation and perhaps forms the basis of the…

The use of "thise" plus a noun (e.g., "thise clerkes," "thise men"), rarely found in Old English, is "particularly common" in Chaucer and Gower; it probably developed in early clerical discourse and, encouraged by some French parallels,spread to…

Describes the historical and regional characteristics of Chaucer's vocabulary, his particular uses of various registers, and how he adapts them to circumstances and contexts.

Demonstrates Chaucer's "skills as a miniaturist," discussing antecedents in rhetorical tradition to the phrase "places delitables" (i.e., "locus amoenus") in FranT (5.899) and the interdependence of "moral and physical gifts" in the description of…

Examines the semantics of approximately fifty words that signify "benevolence and malevolence within courtly contexts in the works of Chaucer," exploring them diachronically and attending to "extralinguistic" factors in order to pursue a "literary…