The unadorned, unironic ParsT is what Chaucer wanted for the ending to CT. The Ricardian pattern of sickness, pilgrimage, and penitence shows why Thomas Gascoigne's narrative of Chaucer's deathbed retraction of his writings is a likely story, or not…
Although twentieth-century editors of Chaucer have produced increasingly sophisticated and tasteful editions of CT, their practices reject methodology dependent on purely objective criteria.
A comparison of Chaucer's narrators and the narrative voices of the "Roman" may clarify the continuing debates on the characteristics of his narrators, their function within the dream poems, and their relation to other narrative voices.
An understanding of Virgilian tragedy, which entails not only a perspective but also a 'retro'spective, helps clarify Chaucer's description of TC as "tragedye."
Furrow, Melissa M.
Chaucer Review 24 (1990): 223-35.
The tale of Custance is related to medieval lives of sainted women but is opposed to them in its concentration on the secular relations of an ordinary woman. Through this tale, the Man of Law seeks to reconcile the conflicting claims of the divine…
The analogies between the Franklin and Dorigen allow Chaucer to relate class to gender and to explore the ways romance imagines the possibilities and the constraints of self-definition.
The Pardoner ironically depicts his musicians playing the wrong instruments for a successful performance, thereby indicating the inherent (and disastrous) competitive nature of their fellowship.
Chaucer completed CkT in approximately seven hundred lines, but since the final quire of the booklet containing the tales of the Miller, Reeve, and Cook was lost very early in the manuscript tradition, the Hengwrt scribe--writing in London or…
Martin, Daniel, and Margaret Wright.
Chaucer Review 24 (1990): 271-73.
The "hostes man" who follows the begging friars of SumT can be identified as the servant of their innkeeper, who follows after them to carry their ill-gotten gains.
Besserman, Lawrence [L.]
Chaucer Review 24 (1990): 306-308.
Not only does Troilus's address to the "paleys desolat" of Criseyde echo the lament over the deserted Jerusalem in the first two chapters of Lamentations, but also Troilus's fixation upon that house is designed to evoke the self-punishing behavior…
As the competition between men intensifies in fragment A of CT, competition becomes an end in itself, and the women become increasingly objectified as persons.
Lynch, Kathryn L.
Chaucer Review 25 (1990): 1-16; 85-95.
Although PF clearly treats love and courtship, its most central or motivating problems is the relationship between choice and will or understanding. Chaucer demonstrates a more thoroughly informed engagement with contemporary philosophy than critics…
Chaucer prepares for Arcite's Samsonlike vow to cut his hair by drawing on the traditions of Samson as a fool for love and by reworking and adding details to the story of Boccaccio's "Teseida." Samson was commonly paired with Hercules as biblical…
An examination of the two earliest-known owners of a CT manuscript suggests that Chaucer's secondary audience was literate, secular in its interests, urban, and word-oriented.
