Brookhouse, Christopher.
Larry D. Benson, ed. The Learned and the Lewed: Studies in Chaucer and Medieval Literature. Harvard English Studies, no. 5 (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974), pp. 67-80.
Appreciative comments on BD, HF, TC, and CT, addressing their concerns with death, isolation, knowledge of self, and above all, the hman need for self-disclosure in confronting these concerns. The human need for narrative is particularly evident in…
Reinecke, George F.
Larry D. Benson, ed. The Learned and the Lewed: Studies in Chaucer and Medieval Literature. Harvard English Studies, no. 5 (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974), pp. 81-93.
Confronts several questions or matters of internal inconsistency in CT (1.164; 1.361; 3.45; 4.1222; 5.673; 2.96; 6.443) and speculates about possible resolutions and their usefulness in the Chaucer classroom.
Reiss, Edmund.
Larry D. Benson, ed. The Learned and the Lewed: Studies in Chaucer and Medieval Literature. Harvard English Studies, no. 5 (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974), pp. 95-111.
Gauges Chaucer's "view and use of love," concentrating on BD, TC, and KnT as his only narratives that take courtly love seriously, both as a theme and a plot device. Even in these cases, courtly love is presented pejoratively--both foolish and…
Leyerle, John.
Larry D. Benson, ed. The Learned and the Lewed: Studies in Chaucer and Medieval Literature. Harvard English Studies, no. 5 (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974), pp. 113-45.
Examines "heart" (in its several meanings) as the nucleus of BD, and "prison"/"chain" as one in KnT, treating each as a structuring device and a wellspring of the themes and imagery in its respective narrative. Similar nuclei function comically in…
Donohue, James J., trans.
Dubuque, Iowa: Loras College Press, 1974.
Verse translations of all of Chaucer's poetry, with the exceptions of CT, TC, and Rom, based on Skeat's edition and arranged in his chronology. Each translation follows Chaucer's verse form and is preceded by a one-page foreword that comments on…
Reisner, Thomas Andrew.
Modern Philology 71 (1974): 301-02.
Clarifies that the phrase "at chirche dore," used twice of the Wife of Bath's marriages indicates that she negotiated the financial arrangements of her dower before her marriage ceremonies, indicating shrewdness.
Argues that MerT reflects delusive male infantile fantasy, reading January as ego, Placebo as id, Justinus as super-ego, and May as an idealized mother figure. The Merchant's encomnium of marriage and Damain's courtly behavior are extensions of…
Peed, Michael R.
American Notes and Queries 12.9-10 (1974): 143-46
Reads the narrator of TC as separate from the poet Chaucer and recognizable in two roles that exist in productive tension: an inexperienced servant of love and a fallible recorder of Trojan history.
Conlee, John W.
American Notes and Queries 12.9-10 (1974): 137-38.
Tallies similarities between RvT and a section in John Barth's novel "Sot-Weed Factor" that indicate direct influence: cast of characters, setting, straying-horse motif, etc.
Axelrod, Steven
Annuale Mediaevale 15 (1974): 109-24.
Critiques George Lyman Kittredge's notion of a feud between the Wife of Bath and the Clerk as "aesthetically displeasing," and argues instead that their tension is essentially jocular, a result of the Wife's hope that she can entice the Clerk. The…
Comments on several themes that recur in Chaucer's poetry and surmises that they may reflect something of his mindset. Discusses cosmic journey and pilgrimage, prayer, experience and authority, and love tidings.
Jambeck, Thomas J., and Karen K. Jambeck
Children's Literature 3 (1974): 177-22.
Praises the stylistic appropriateness of Astr to its youthful audience, showing how Chaucer adapts the lexicon, syntax, and rhetoric of Massahalla to be more suitable to his ten-year-old son, Lewis. Chaucer relies on native rather than Latinate…
Brewer, D[erek]. S.
Poetica (Tokyo) 1 (1974): 1-20.
Examines the word "sad" in ClT to show that meaning and nuance in Chaucer's poetry derive, not from patterns of similarity or metaphor, but from metonymic contiguity, which functions much as does the "creative contiguity" of Gothic juxtaposition.…
Rogers, William Elford
Annuale Mediaevale 15 (1974): 74-108
Close reading of the speech patterns of the Canterbury pilgrims in the links between the tales, focusing on level of diction (Romance vocabulary), syntax, and figurative language, and relating these features to characterization. Comments at length on…
Sanborn, John N.
Colby Library Quarterly 0.8 (1974): 486-94.
Assesses the poetic structure of Edwin Arlington Robinson's "The Man Against the Sky," demonstrating that it "juxtaposes two dissimilar ideas forcing a new understanding of relationship" in an inorganic fashion similar to that found in Ovid, Chaucer,…
Leicester, H. Marshall, Jr.
Chaucer Review 9 (1974): 109-24.
Argues that PF "exemplifies and confronts" late fourteenth-century concern with the role of subjective perspective in considering traditional authority. Through various stylized, "thought-marked" perspectives, the poem presents the "disruptive force"…
Analyzes the gothic, inorganic structure of BD, commenting on the poem's status as a lament, an elegy, and a consolation; its clear articulation of various parts; and its consistency with the compositional advice given by rhetorician Geoffrey of…
Differentiates the lover's malady in BD from the traditional love-sickness found in its analogues, identifying the malady as a form of head melancholy curable by a good night's sleep, the narrator's only physician. The comic version of the tale of…
Reads Constance in MLT as an "Everywoman" who represents humanity in relationship to an "arbitrary and inscrutable God." Several abrupt descents into "crudity" in the tale remind us not to regard Constance as real, and contrasts with her mothers in…
Summarizes R. K. Root's theory of three classes of TC manuscripts, and analyzes several variants to argue for the superiority of those found in Root's "beta" class. Treats "beta" variants as authorial revisions.
Friedman, Albert B.
Chaucer Review 9 (1974): 118-29.
Challenges critics who absolve Chaucer of anti-Semitism by blaming the Prioress instead. Anti-Semitism was rife in Chaucer's society, and he was likely complicit in the bias. Yet, the topic is a critical distraction in discussions of PrT, which…
Studies the astrological references in WBP and casts her horoscope, interpreting it to show that Chaucer illumines "the entire character of the Wife with a configuration of planets unique in the fourteenth century," a configuration that occurred in…
Examines the Prioress's claim that she is unequal to the task of praising Mary as an example of the inexpressibility topos, used recurrently in the Middle Ages to express the ineffable. Comments on several instances of the topos used by theologians…
