Browse Items (16476 total)

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…

Religious hypocrisy, so crucially the key to the Pardoner's success, had for a London audience of the 1390s an urgent topicality.

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…

SumT represents a genre most expressive of medieval popular concerns, the grotesque or carnivalesque. Andreas applies theories of Bakhtin.

The 1989 report of the Committee on Chaucer Bibliography and Research; lists 362 Chaucer studies.

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.

A list of every marginal notation in every manuscript of TC.

By emending Constance's plea to the constable from "The lyf out of hir body for to twynne" to "The lyf not of hir body for to twynne," an emendation that has no support from the variant readings of the manuscripts, we can bring the line into harmony…

Editions of HF, in emending the "laugh" of line 2018 to "languisshe," confuse rather than clarify the meaning of the Eagle's advice.

An understanding of legal terminology and of legal history clarifies two passages in KnT.

Since Chaucer did not indicate any punctuation, unpuctuating Chaucer can help us read Chaucer's poetry more flexibly and vivaciously.

An examination of Chaucer's original family name, Malyn, casts doubt on previous claims that Chaucer's family was involved in leather making. For social and commercial reasons, Chaucer was a more acceptable surname. Chaucer used Malyn or its…

TC is a drama of "entente," concerned more with why people do things than what they do. Chaucer uses "entente" here much more heavily than in any of his earlier works and evokes its numerous meanings. As the poem progresses, there is a "slippage of…

Chaucer's Pandarus is based to a certain extent on the character of Philosophy in Boethius's Consolation, and his Troilus resembles Boethius. Troilus's change during the poem can be attributed to the fact that "he has experienced the consolation of…

The Prioress's worldly graces and associations with Mary are well-suited to her esteemed position of religious and social power. Frank speculates that Chaucer chose PrT for its associations with the "cult of Notre Dame du Puy."

Because it contains the fewest emendations and corresponds most closely to Chaucer's MLT, the version of Les Cronicles in the MS Paris, Bibl. Nationale, Franc. 9687, fols. 1va-114va (ca. 1340-50), will serve as a base text for the Chaucer Library…

Discusses Chaucer's characterization of the Summoner in GP and asserts that, despite modern assumptions, it is based on the confluence of medical and astrological theories prevalent during Chaucer's time.

Chaucer criticizes not anti-Semitism but rather the Prioress herself. The Prioress does not believe in New Testament attitudes on accepting Jews. Despite being a nun, she is unyielding in her belief that Jews are evil.

Comparison of traditional rites to the feelings and actions of the characters shows that lack of structure does not mean disorder. Moore contends that there is no correlation between ritual and the outcome of KnT; in fact, a ritualistic beginning…

Discusses herb paris as a premedieval symbol of Christ's passion and divine love, traces its development from religious to romantic sign, and explores its dual meaning in MilT.

According to the rules for infidelity in the Middle Ages, Phebus's wife is guilty of both adultery and high treason since she commits adultery with a person of lower birth and social class.

ManT examines the kind of language by which a poet can survive. Given the historical context of Richard II's reign and the contemporary chronicle literature that warned of the necessity of suppressing one's speech, the individual must resort to…

ManT is concerned with the method by which a story is told. Emphasis on the "gods' role in human marriage" restores the relationship between word and deed, a relationship important to the narrator of CT. Chaucer's numerous voices can be heard as…

In KnT, Chaucer manipulates devices of genre and rhetoric to achieve a highly sophisticated subtext of opacity and of perversion of order.

In contrast to the strong heroines in French romances, Criseyde is a weak, passive individual who does not act but is acted upon. Chaucer creates her this way deliberately to make her "magically attractive"--she is "lovely undefined responsiveness,"…