Wonders how the transgender experience allows a "trans textuality" and offers an example of this proposed theoretical approach to manuscripts via a consideration of the Ellesmere manuscript.
Byeong-yong, Son.
Medieval and Early Modern English Studies 22.2 (2014): 61-81.
Looks at the political and social context of Chaucer's life, and claims that in KnT Chaucer appropriated and transformed the conventions of romance to reflect his own political views about medieval kingship.
Byers, John R., Jr.
English Language Notes 4 (1966): 6-9.
Argues that the Host's oath by the "precious corpus Madrian" in CT (MkP 7.1892) refers to St. Hadrian or Adrian, adducing details from the "Golden Legend" and citing the Host's "untrained ear," as well as parallels with Melibee's wife, Prudence, and…
Byrd, David G.
Ball State University Forum 19.3 (1978): 56-64.
Standard modern studies of courtly love do not refer to a term used in French poetry, "blanche fever." A study of this sickness endured by the lovers in TC, "Confessio Amantis," "The Cuckoo and the Nightingale," and Caxton's "History of Jason"…
Byrd, Forrest M.
Publications of the Arkansas Philological Association 10 (1984): 29-43.
Examines the role of conditional language structures--subjunctive, disjunctive, hypothetical, contingent--in irony, ambiguity, and attempts to control the future.
Byron-Davies, Justin M.
Revelation and the Apocalypse in Late Medieval Literature: The Writings of Julian of Norwich and William Langland (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2020), pp. 130-73.
Opens with brief contrasts between the uses of dream vision in NPT, Gower's "Vox clamantis," and Langland's "Piers Plowman" before examining at greater length Langland's use of literary techniques that echo the Bible.
Caballero-Torralbo, Juan de Dios, and Javier Martın-Parraga, eds.
Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2015.
Collection of essays that provides various approaches to the study and teaching of the Middle Ages. For an essay that pertains to Chaucer, search for New Medievalisms under Alternative Title.
Caballero-Torralbo, Juan de Dios.
Juan de Dios Caballero-Torralbo and Javier Martın-Parraga, eds. New Medievalisms (Newcastle upon Tyne: 2015), pp. 149–76.
Surveys themes and plots in HF, comments on its sources, and discusses its "narrator-character."
Cable, Thomas.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991.
Disputes the traditional view that the English alliterative poetical tradition was consistent from the seventh through the fifteenth centuries and proposes profound differences between Old English meter, early Middle English meter, and Alliterative…
Cable, Thomas.
Donka Minkova and Robert Stockwell, eds. Studies in the History of the English Language: A Millennial Perspective (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2002), pp. 177-82.
Critiques Youmans and Li's assessment of Chaucer's verse (in this same volume, pp. 153-75), urging metricists to avoid "importing phonological analyses" into theory of meter.
Cable, Thomas.
Donka Minkova and Robert Stockwell, eds. Studies in the History of the English Language: A Millennial Perspective (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2002), pp. 125-51.
Surveys twentieth-century developments in describing and analyzing the prosody of early English poetry, summarizing and assessing the views of Wimsatt and Beardsley, Halle and Keyser, Kiparsky, and others on meter, stress, ictus and their relations.…
Cable, Thomas.
Yoko Iyeiri and Margaret Connolly, eds. And Gladly Wolde He Lerne and Gladly Teche: Essays on Medieval English Presented to Professor Matsuji Tajima on His Sixtieth Birthday (Tokyo: Kaibunsha, 2002), pp. 109-25.
Cable laments deterioration in the understanding of Chaucer's meter. He argues that too little attention has been paid to the loss of final -e in the fifteenth century, leading to misreading the poetry of Lydgate, Hoccleve, Barclay, and Hawes.
Cable, Thomas.
C. B. McCully and J. J. Anderson, eds. English Historical Metrics (Cambridge and New York : Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 7-29.
Cable traces a pattern of development in English stress "clashing," affected by stress subordination and stress spacing. Chaucer's "alternating metre has frequent stress subordination, but it is less clear that it makes systematic use of stress…
Investigates the "active tension" between the characterization of the Manciple and the nature of ManT, analyzing differences between the Tale and its sources and analogues (especially characterizations and moralizations) to show how Chaucer…
Cadden, Joan.
Medievalia et Humanistica 14 (1986): 157-71.
Medical and scientific authors discussed sexual matters with clinical frankness. Chaucer's Merchant sees Constantinus Africanus as "a pander, a peddler of love potions."
Cadden, Joan.
Lorraine Daston and Fernando Vidal, eds. The Moral Authority of Nature (Chicago and London : University of Chicago Press, 2004), pp. 207-31.
Cadden traces the "persistent association of nature with moral conduct and social order" in various late medieval texts, from commentaries on Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics to vernacular poetry. Focuses on PF as an example in which both desire and…
Cader, Teresa D.
Robert Pack and Jay Parini, eds. Touchstones: American Poets on a Favorite Poem (Hanover, N. H.: University Press of New England, 1996), pp. 31-36.
Explicates the opening eighteen lines of GP to demonstrate Chaucer's rich combination of formal prosodic devices, colloquial variety of register, and thematic resonance. The appeal of his verse "lies primarily in its sound."
Language, money, and gender are "signifying systems" that underlie notions of law and order in medieval tradition. Cady examines how Chaucer presents the interactions of these systems in WBPT, MerT, and PardT.
Cady, Diane.
New Medieval Literatures 17 (2017): 115-49.
Explores medieval analogies between "storytelling and merchandizing" and how both relate to gender in MLT, clarifying connections between the travel narrative, its rhetoric, and the poverty prologue, and commenting on source and analogue relations.…
Cady, Diane.
Craig E. Bertolet and Robert Epstein, eds. Money, Commerce, and Economics in Late Medieval English Literature (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), pp. 109-26.
Explores "links between gender ideology and money in the late Middle Ages," arguing that Chaucer's "depiction of his purse as a faithless female lover" in Purse reflects the "cultural imaginary around money before the emergence of
political…
Cady, Diane.
The Gender of Money in Middle English Literature: Value and Economy in Late Medieval England (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), pp. 125-60.
Explores how medieval travel writers "imagine storytelling and merchandising as analogous enterprises," how they intersect with "gender ideology" wherein "texts are imagined as both feminine corpora and feminized commodities," and how the Man of…
Cahn, Kenneth S.
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 2 (1980): 81-119.
Demonstrates that the Merchant engages neither in usury nor in illegal speculation. Selling "sheeldes" (imaginary coins "of accounts" employed in Flanders) is simply a means of "borrowing" English sterling through foreign exchange. The Merchant is…
Caie, Graham [D.]
Hiroshima Studies in English Language and Literature 46 : 1-12, 2001.
Caie comments on the presence of glosses in English literary manuscripts, arguing that glosses to WBP, MerT, and MLT can be read as attempts by Chaucer (or his scribes) to contain the subversive potential of texts that the glosses accompany.
Summary (without text) and commentary on MerT, arranged in sections, accompanied by glosses to Middle English phrases. Also includes a brief introduction to Chaucer and his backgrounds; commentary on themes, characterization, and style of MerT; the…
